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LIFE ON A BACKWOODS FARM 


OR 


THE BOYHOOD OF 
REUBEN RODNEY BLANNERHASSETT 


WILLIAM RILEY HALSTEAD 


Author of “ Future Religious Policy of America, 
“Civil and Religious Forces,” Etc. 


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iB94 


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CINCINNATI : CRANSTON & CURTS 
NEW YORK : HUNT & EATON 
1894 


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COPYRIGHT 

BY CRANSTON & CURTS, 
1894. 







PREFACE. 


'T'HIS book is in no sense personal history. 

A Its intent is to be true to life, and not to 
fact. The imagination is at play, therefore; but 
not as in works of morbid sensational fiction. 
It is the more wholesome imagination possessed 
by the plowman, and the well-digger, and the 

I blacksmith, and the uncultured huntsman. 

The author, of necessity, leaves the merits of 
the volume to the estimate to be placed upon it 
by its readers ; but he may safely say of it, that 
it is not imitative. There is no other book like 
it. Its method is its own; but as to that, the 
author has thoroughly tested it in public utter- 
ance, and he trusts it will not fail him in the 
printed page. 


3 



4 


Preface. 


As it is not a learned book, the scholars will 
have no recognition. It is not a novel. It is 
not a story. There is no attempt at coherence 
of time or place. It is incident without a 
plot — a simple medley of country tales. Rod- 
ney is, at least, not an impossible boy. The 
tales he spins are supposed to be a few of the 
things that touched his life to make him what 
he was — manly, strong, honest — and they are the 
things that touch every life. The waves of little 
events are thrown up against a boy’s spirit, and 
he tells you how he felt and what he thought 
about them. The contention is, that everything 
has significance to the character. Please do 
not ask of the things you find recorded here, 
“Did that happen?” but ask, “ Could that hap- 
pen? and would it have the consequences put 
down to it?” 

The artificial and the formal are abolished, 
and we have gone out in the sun and open air, 
among men and women who are strangers to 
the delicacies of refined living, who are yet 
rough and uncouth with the hardships of toil, 
but who are intensely [active, who have never 
regretted being born, and who have never 


Preface. 


5 


thought of apologizing for the presumption of 
being in the world. 

The output of American literature to this 
time has hardly been true to the American spirit 
and American conditions. To the extent that 
we write books like they do in Germany, or as 
we imitate the classics, we shall belong to the 
ancient school, and possess nothing on our own 
account. We shall be devoid of origination. 
The traditional in literature has certainly been 
sufficiently magnified. The power of the mas- 
ters of the great past might well now become 
less, while we give a little more time and inter- 
est to that which is natural to us. Our literary 
plant will not abide unless it be indigenous to 
the soil. The better literary material for any 
people is not an import. Charles Dickens 
taught the English-speaking world that there is 
a never-ending supply of it in the manners and 
habits and lives of the common people. 

In the preparation of this work the author 
has felt as if he were hacking a narrow roadway 
through a vast forest. It may be the road will 
get the forest settled. 

WILLIAM RILEY HALSTEAD. 

EvansviUvE, Indiana. 









CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER I. page. 

Childhood and Country Life, n 

CHAPTER II. 

I was Born, 18 

CHAPTER III. 

The Black God, 35 

CHAPTER IV. 

Cruelty and Treachery, 42 

CHAPTER V. 

Joe Coneer, the Crazy Man, 56 

CHAPTER VI. 

Jim Handy, the Villain, 69 


CHAPTER VII. 

. 88 


Reuben Blannerhassett, 


7 



8 


Contents. 


chapter VIII. 

Page. 

A Beack Woef, 94 

CHAPTER IX. 

A Panther Skin, 106 

CHAPTER X. 

Witches, 121 

CHAPTER XI. 

Daniee and the Great Dipper, -132 

CHAPTER XII. 

Animae Characteristics, 156 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Fishing Scrapes, 184 

CHAPTER XIV. 

“Wied Oats”— T wo Crops, 200 

CHAPTER XV. 

An Indian Legend, 213 

CHAPTER XVI. 

Sunshine, 239 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 


Page 

“A Jack-oak Structure,” Frontispiece . 

“ Beack me, then !” 37 

“ Here you go, now,” 51 

“I WANTED TO KIEE OED JlM,” * * * 86 

A Nine-miee Chase, ioi 

Rodney and Daniee, 145 

Breastworks next to the Enemy, 166 

Emperor and King Lear, 179 

A Hundred Pounds of Beack Bass, 192 

“We put chips on his eyes,” 206 


The Wigwam of Lena and Nemo, 


9 


224 













Life oh a Backwood? Farm. 




CHAPTER I. 


CHILDHOOD AND COUNTRY LIFE. 

“Away, away, from men and towns, 

To the wild wood and the downs — 

To the silent wilderness, 

Where the soul need not repress 
Its music, lest it should not find 
An echo in another’s mind, 

While the touch of nature’s art 
Harmonizes heart to heart.” — Shei^EY. 

M Y name is Reuben Rodney Blannerhassett. 

I tell you that now, so you will know who 
I am. And I want to say a thing or two before 
I begin. I doubt if the world has ever made 
due estimate of the earlier years of the per- 
sonal life. Some one has said that the charac- 
ter is usually fixed at twelve. After this, it is 

ii 



12 


lyiFK on a Backwoods Barm. 


true, there are remarkable changes and transfor- 
mations; but by this time the formative work 
has been largely done. I believe this position 
to be sound, so this record will close before I 
am grown. I shall not tell you of greatness, 
but of boyhood. That is all. That is enough. 
I have no deep-laid purpose to afflict you with 
any special theories of life, or of religion, or of 
politics. I shall hide nothing, extenuate noth- 
ing, and when I get through I will stop. 

The little incidents of childhood are among 
the greatest of all events in the formation of the 
character. The child mind and heart are unre- 
servedly open and receptive to all influences. 
It has but small capacity to shut down the 
gates against anything. Impressions are re- 
ceived as they come. All things are realistic. 
Early experiences are more completely thrown 
into one’s being. They are the larger forces in 
making us what we are. The past is not gone. 
It is present, and is being reproduced with each 
successive moment. It is a law of the physical 
world that nothing is lost. All forces are con- 
served. If the events of childhood were only 
memories, they would be no more than idle 
tales, fit only to amuse and entertain. They are 
present realities. Each small event leaves its 
impress and becomes a part of the character. 


Childhood and Country L<ifr. 13 

The essence and the meaning of things we pos- 
sess to-day. We can not escape the least inci- 
dent ; and we are either wiser or worse because 
of it. It speaks to the world in whatever it has 
helped to make us. That an influence is small, 
does not signify that it is not real. 

It is with man as with nature. The chem- 
istries of the soil and the sky are carried up into 
the plant, and are not lost but reproduced. The 
vegetable mold, with its forces and laws, is 
reproduced in the animal kingdom. So the 
animal life is reproduced in man, and enthroned 
with reason. The human spirit is a reservoir of 
storages and reproductions. The personal pres- 
ent is simply the full expression of the past. 
What we are to-day is a recapitulation of what 
we have gone over and known. Why should 
we have memory? Why should we linger over 
the past? Why do we like to think of child- 
hood joys and sorrows? Why do we cherish 
the simple days when we put our little faces be- 
tween our mother’s knees and cried our discon- 
tent into refreshment? Why do we linger in 
delight over the barefooted tramps, the journeys 
to kinsfolk, and the school-day sports? Because 
the whole of all that was ever real of this is 
stored in us. 

These things are a part of ourselves. We 


14 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

can not escape them. They have had vitally to 
do in making us what we are. The flying years 
give us a sight of ourselves; and we see what 
they have done. An old man delights to enter- 
tain you with his childhood; and in so doing, 
he is simply bringing the record up to date. 
The fulfillment of more than he will ever tell 
you is there before you. So the past, not in its 
incidental and surface form, but in its essential 
value, is being constantly restored and repro- 
duced. God finally weaves all the raveled ends 
into the fabric. The time of the restitution of 
all things is now. 

You start up a mountain road. The first day 
the flowers are in bloom at the base. The next 
day the sun brings out the same bloom on the 
next altitude, and the next the same; and 
after you have reached the summit, and look 
back, a great scene is before you. But more 
than this, that journey has become permanently 
a part of you. The road, the flowers, the 
rugged rocks, the cascades, the trees, the cloud- 
burst, with every vision of your eye, — all this has 
become a part of you never to be effaced. That 
picture, finer than human artist could furnish 
for a mint of gold, is yours forever. You return 
to the valley, you cross the seas, you live half a 
century, but that mountain scene, sunshine and 


Childhood and Country Life. 15 

all, has been ineffacebly placed on the canvas of 
your soul. That mountain did not absorb you ; 
you absorbed the mountain. It will add rich- 
ness to your spirit in eternity. In this way we 
take up and retain the essence of things, great 
and small, as we go. This is not because we will, 
but whether we will or no. It is not a question 
of preference. This law of human life would 
be fearful indeed were it not for the fact that 
the human personality is greater than all events. 
They shall not take the personality up into 
themselves. Time shall not, death shall not, 
eternity shall not ; for the personality shall sur- 
vive eternity. Only it will be influenced in one 
way or another by all its events, either in time 
or in eternity. 

It is in this sense that the records of my boy- 
hood days are not trivial affairs; because they 
are the things that have entered my life. 
They are the lessons God and nature and child- 
hood brought me. Only in the smallest degree 
am I responsible for them. God himself would 
not deal justly with me if he did not take these 
things into the final adjudication. 

Fifty years in this country measures a swift 
progress from savage wildness in a wilderness 
to the highest forms of civilization and culture. 


1 6 Fife on a Backwoods Farm. 

Within this limit, the uncouth and hard-handed 
pioneer has given way to the dweller in a pal- 
ace. To children now accustomed to our deli- 
cate ways of living, the experiences of our older 
people are like myths. They wonder how such 
things could have been. What wildness then, 
what freedom of spirit, what brusque indepen- 
dence of character, born of the solitariness of 
sparse populations and of a single-handed 
struggle with nature. 

The heroic element, then, had larger cultiva- 
tion in the excitements of the chase, in Indian 
wars, and in the absence of many of the whole- 
some civil regulations which now settle disputed 
questions between man and man. But is it not 
true that the thousand and one forces that in- 
fluenced the human spirit in this semi-civilized 
state, contributed in a very significant way to 
the development of the stronger features of the 
American character? Are not the destinies usu- 
ally settled for a race before it comes into real 
refinement? Refinement has its luxuries and 
its advantages, and it has its enervations also. 
The personal life in any pioneer time is usually 
a case of the survival of the fittest. When 
houses are poor, and clothing is scant, and food 
is of little variety and ill-prepared, the chances 
are against any born child coming to maturity. 


Childhood and Country Life. 17 

Those who do make the riffle are likely to pos- 
sess remarkable force and vigor. On the other 
hand, crowded populations hamper the spirit. 
They afford fewer chances for original growth. 
The city produces men. The country produces 
a man. But the child needs for companionship 
something more than human beings about it. 
It needs the fields, and trees, and rocks, and 
rivers, and birds, and animals tame and wild. 
The growing mind needs time and a chance to 
vegetate. The body needs free air for expan- 
sion. The typical New Yorker to-day is nearly 
an eighth smaller than the Middle Western State 
man. He is brighter mentally, but not so 
strong. The poverty and the hardships of a 
primitive country life are not calamities in the 
long run. 

The Jacksons and the Lincolns and the Gar- 
fields and the Grants grew up under conditions 
greatly deflected from modern childhood ; yet 
they survived all hindrances and disgraces, and 
came to significance. They came out of them 
in the sense that these limitations of opportu- 
nity were the making of their spirits. They 
grew out of them in the sense that we may not 
see their like again in manly force and greatness. 

The contributions of country life to national 
progress is one of the significant lessons of the 


1 8 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

time. The gift of leaders from the rural regions 
has been of inestimable value to the Nation. 
Rough-handed countrymen led in the War of the 
Revolution and in placing the foundations of the 
Republic. Washington and Adams and Jefferson 
were country born. Andrew Jackson loved the 
Hermitage more than any other place, because 
it expressed the conditions and the best forces 
of his child-life, and added to them all the more 
desirable advantages of country living. 

Cities to-day, as compared with the country, 
hold primacy of influence, but they do it 
through fresh infusions from country blood. 
The advantages to child-life in the country, as 
compared with the city, are very greatly supe- 
rior. To have been a country bumpkin is a great 
investment. Not in polish, not in culture as we 
ordinarily understand it; not in the fineries of life, 
but in the broad acquisitions of physical and 
intellectual brawn, and in the higher moral and 
spiritual possibilities which God and nature can 
put into a man when they have him to them- 
selves during the years of his childhood. A boy 
does not grow by being put into a stretcher. 
Furnish him good victuals, and he will look after 
that thing himself. The greatest and most vi- 
rile forces in the personal character are not 
ground in by human attrition. They grow; 


Childhood and Country Life. 


19 


and for such growths there must be time for ru- 
mination. When you tell a boy to “go to grass,” 
you advise one of the greatest things for his 
spirit. A boy follows not lines of thought, but 
lines of life. He is engaged not in mental but 
in heart questoning, and he gets answers that he 
knows not of, and will not until he reaches the ce- 
lestial kingdom. A thousand unsuspected voices 
in the country call the soul to the companion- 
ship of spiritual things. The waters, the teeming 
soil, the dew, the rainfall, the storm-cloud and 
the lightning, the hushed breathing of all life, 
the cherishing warmth of the rising sun, the 
cold Platonic friendship of the stars, — these for- 
bid idolatry. They do not invite worship of 
themselves. They lead to life, and to sympa- 
thy, and to God. 


CHAPTER II. 


1 WAS BORN. 

“Up! up, my friend! and quit your books, 

Or surely you’ 11 grow double : 

Up ! up, my friend ! and clear your looks ; 

Why all this toil and trouble? 

One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 

Of moral evil and of good, 

Than all the sages can.” — Wordsworth. 

D ID you ever smell newly-plowed ground? 

Pity for the nostrils that never caught the 
aroma of such a field ! Did you ever taste the 
breath of a May morning as yon waded in the 
grass till you were wet to your neck? Were 
you ever in the open and fruitful fields at day- 
break in the summer-time, and to remain there 
till dark, to see just how long a day in the coun- 
try is? You city folks, you get up so late, you 
do not know how early the sun rises to kiss the 


I Was Born. 


21 


brow of the morning, and to clothe his child the 
day, and get it ready for its work. Sunrise in 
the country sets the throats of the songsters to 
going; and takes the covering of the night from 
the flowers; and has everything ready for your 
admiration long before you are awake. There 
is a breath of lengthened life each morning be- 
tween daylight and sun-up, but it never comes 
indoors. It was never known to break a lock, 
or blow out a smudging night-lamp, or pull a 
blanket from the nose of a drowsy sleeper. 

Did you ever walk through the fields and 
pluck clover-blossoms for your mouth ; and did 
you ever find a honey-bee in the meshes? Did 
you ever swim in the creek until your back was 
blistered in the sun? Did you ever eat persim- 
mons before frost? Did you ever get as many 
black haws as you could eat? Did you ever 
bet six tobacco marbles with your neighbor’s sec- 
ond boy that you could eat more green apples 
than he could — worms and all? Did you ever 
follow an A harrow all day barefooted, with a 
stone-bruise on your heel? Did you ever have 
to hold a skein of yarn while your grandmother 
wound it off of you on to the ball? Did you 
ever have to go to bed while you had your pants 
patched? Did you ever wear just one suspender 
one whole summer? Did you ever try to drive 


22 


L,ife on a Backwoods Farm. 


thirteen pigs out of a cornfield when they did 
not want to go? Did you ever hive bumble-bees 
in a jug? Did you ever plug up the hole in a 
hornet’s nest with a corn-cob? If you never 
did, you do n’t know very much about life in 
the backwoods. 

I wonder that I did not die when I was a 
baby. I never expected to live to be a man; 
but now, since I am through with it, things do 
not seem so bad. There is, after all, an element 
of delightfulness about hardship, but only after 
you get by it for a time. This is so, I suppose, 
because the higher reason of it does not appear 
while passing through it. In the midst of hard- 
ship or sorrow, we are too close to understand. 
After ten or twenty years we see things in per- 
spective. We have no place for sorrows while 
we are in them; but they pass by and we re- 
main ; and God shows them to us afterwards in 
such splendid relief that we not unwillingly 
read into them our life lessons. We endure the 
stints of poverty, we suffer and groan and weep, 
and afterwards laughter breaks through our 
tears. 

I was born on a bleak, blustery night in 
March, in the year eighteen hundred and- 


■no 


I Was Born. 


23 


matter when. I have no personal recollection 
of the event, anyway. Having certain reasons 
for beginning thus, I simply vouch for the fact 
that I was born, and that is sufficient for all the 
purposes of these narratives. Dates are some- 
times embarrassing. 

Our cabin stood on a cleared knoll of four 
acres, just west of a town called Hazelgreen. 
The prairie skirted us to the south, coming 
np to the foot of the knoll like the arm of a 
great sea, and opening to the eye a stretch of 
vision for more than twenty miles, with only an 
occasional tree to break the view. There was 
heavy timber on the east, and also on the west, 
following the bed of Honey Creek to the Wa- 
bash fifteen miles away. To the north, the tim- 
ber, except an occasional break made by a 
small clearing, extended forty miles, with only 
blazed paths, and narrow, rugged roadways 
through it. It was a wilderness vaster than 
the prairie south of us. The Indians, as a 
body, had fled before the approach of the pale 
face, and had left him in peaceable possession of 
a heritage of unmeasured riches. It was no un- 
common thing, however, for an aged, wandering 
red-skin to return to these the hunting grounds 
of his youth, as if it had gone from his memory 
that the white man had taken it from him; and 


24 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


he would only appear to come to a realization 
of the fact when he would approach the cabins 
and clearings; and then, in a lonesome way, turn 
into the woods and be gone. What strange be- 
ings these old Indians were! How silent and 
mysterious their movements! They seemed as 
if they were dying broken-hearted that the rich- 
est hunting-grounds they ever knew were 
wrested from them forever. A lone Indian was 
known to the settlers to be harmless. 

The Delawares were most acquainted with 
this region, and a number of their older men 
were rather familiar objects to the settlers. 
Their returning became finally the occasion of 
a tragedy. In cold blood four of them were 
killed in the space of a month ; and it provoked 
threatenings of a general massacre from the Del- 
aware tribe. It was a cowardly deed, evidently 
perpetrated by some white man for revenge, or 
from natural hate. 

The Delawares were promised full redress, if 
the guilty party could be found. The settlers 
finally fixed on a comer from the south, who 
had furnished them with a two-sided clew 
against himself. One was the statement that 
his family had been the victims of Indian 
treachery ; and the other the unwary statement 
that whenever he saw an Indian, he shut one 


I Was Born. 


25 


eye, and they never met again. This man, John 
Gleaso, shortly afterward disappeared. What 
became of him, no one ever knew certainly. It 
was said by the knowing ones that he was spot- 
ted to the Delawares, and they did the rest. 

Hazelgreen consisted at first of one shanty, 
in which lived one man and one woman. These 
two were the joint owners of a barrel of whisky 
and a milch-cow. In this family life — or part- 
nership arrangement, I do not know which — the 
woman managed the whisky, and the man the 
cow. This sort of division of the labor may 
have been for the reason that if the man should 
manage the whisky, he would drink up all the 
profits. The more satisfactory explanation is, 
that the woman was the man of the house. 
This man did chores and small jobs. After a 
time there was added to this first essential equip- 
ment of a trading post in a new country, a 
small stock of groceries, to supply the little ne- 
cessities of the settlers. 

This re-enforcement of stock was never more 
than a makeshift — a sort of bait and blind to 
draw trade to the liquor business. Hazelgreen 
began as a whisky town, it lived as a whisky 
town, it died as a whisky town. Whisky sell- 
ing was always the uppermost business in it. 


26 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

So it did quite an amount to blast and damn tlie 
community. 

Our cabin was a jack-oak structure, sixteen 
by eighteen, with a seven-foot ceiling. It had 
white-oak chink-timber — the heart pieces of a 
board tree. It was daubed with yellow clay, 
mixed without lime; and the mortar was put on 
in such profuse fashion, that the clay filling the 
bark of the jack-oak logs gave it a most grotesque 
appearance. The gables were of like material 
with the walls, the logs being sloped at the ends, 
and each one made shorter so as to receive the 
roof-poles and make the slant. The roof-poles 
reached the length of the roof, and answered 
the double purpose of rafter and sheeting to re-/ 
ceive the four-foot clapboards. T)n the top of 
these boards were laid other roof-poles, withed 
to those underneath at the ends — this to hold 
the boards in place. It was a roof made with- 
out nails or stroke of hammer. There were two 
doors, each made of fourteen-inch poplar-plank 
which had been cut with a whip-saw. Each 
door was made of two planks, battened and hung 
on wooden hinges. The memory of those 
hinges makes my flesh creep to this day. Of all 
the noises in this time of strange noises, these 
hinges made the worst. It did not seem to oc- 


I Was Born. 


27 


cur to any one to oil or soap them, and give the 
community rest from the discordant thing. 
The fireplace had a base of these jack-oak logs, 
split in halves, and notched into a frame to hold 
in place the sandstone rock that made the sides 
and back-jam of the six-foot fireplace. The 
chimney was made of lath and mortar. It was 
made wide, so that one could sit by the fire and 
look out at the top of the chimney into the top 
of a tree that stood near. In this fireplace 
there was ample space for cooking. The fire 
had to make its own way against the rain, and, 
of course, the smoke could depart at leisure. 
This arrangement also answered the purpose of 
a window in the daytime. The yellow clay mor- 
tar on the lath was constantly washing off, and 
it was a frequent thing for the chimney to take 
fire and burn down a foot or so before it was 
discovered. The water-bucket was kept on a 
bench inside near the door, and a woman could 
throw water to the top, and put it out. 

Our cabin met the conditions of inside and 
outside harmony. The ashen floor was always 
clean and white ; for my mother was as fit for a 
palace as for a cabin. The flat rock hearth was 
not very elegantly laid. I11 the fireplace was 
the swinging crane, that, like Pluto, lived in the 
middle of the flame. There was the great iron 


28 


IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 


pot in the corner, which was filled at least once 
a week with ham, or sirloin of venison. In the 
corner next the fireplace were seven shelves, 
held by wooden pins in the logs. Over these 
hung a flax cloth. These shelves held the table 
outfit — six pewter plates, with as many knives 
and forks; a wooden tray for bread; a Plymouth 
Rock meat-dish; a sugar-bowl of china, the 
priceless heirloom of some high Scotch ancestry, 
the pedigree to which was lost before I was 
born; three coffee-cups, with saucers; two an- 
cient silver spoons, and three brass ones. These 
shelves were made for this table equipment, and 
nothing else was allowed on them. 

In the corner next to the cupboard was a 
frying-pan, with a handle six feet long. In that 
long-handled frying-pan was put the venison- 
steak for breakfast; and as soon as it was made 
brown and fine over the fire, the steak was 
turned into the platter ; and after that, the same 
pan received the buckwheat-batter. That is 
why it is called buckwheat. Buckwheat-cakes, 
venison-steak, and butter and wild honey! 
What a breakfast ! No table of royalty ever 
had better. 

In another corner of this room was an im- 
provised bedstead, built into the walls by the 
man who built the house. In the remaining 


I Was Born. 


29 


corner was the only piece of pretentious furni- 
ture in the house — a black-walnut store bed- 
stead, with corner posts six by six by seven 
feet high. This was a spare bed for the 
stranger within our gates. I remember two 
things about that bedstead. I was never 
able to get in it without climbing the cor- 
ner post, till I was ten years old, and the 
trundle-bed was underneath, and needed no 
pulling out.' ^ T>~th"e memory of those trundle- 
bed days ! How we did sleep then ! We really 
went to sleep ! We stayed there till morning ! 
We snored away the nights in sweet oblivion of 
the world’s carking cares. ~K healthy boy 
asleep in a trundle-bed, in a cabin, on a winter 
night, is happiness complete! No period along 
the long lonesome years will be richer in pleas- 
ure. Search for perfect hygienic conditions, and 
it is there. Ask for a prophecy of greatness in 
mind or body, and it is there. We now live in 
palaces. We are wrapped in fine linen. On 
cushioned couches we lie awake through the 
long hours of the night, and think, and think, 
and are unable to lay down the burdens of the 
day. The floodgates of the mind are open, and 
they refuse to be closed. 

O, my weary soul, comfort yourself in these 
glorious days of a barefooted paradise, followed 


30 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

by nights of slumber in the old-fashioned trun- 
dle-bed! The world is now running at high 
pressure. The springs of life are all in tension. 
This hot and restless age is burning the life out 
of souls. It puts them under the whip and 
into the ceaseless grind of destiny. Thousands 
wish they had never been born. No boy in a 
trundle-bed ever waked up to wish that. Civil- 
ization has its disadvantages. 

But as I was about to tell you, on this bleak, 
howling night in March I came into this world. 
I had no expectations about that event of course. 
As well as I remember, the flicker of the fire- 
light hurt my eyes. The tallow candle was 
smudging on the shelf. My grandmother was 
too fussy by half. I had some difficulty with my 
nose getting it started. And I had an indistinct 
impression that I had come into a flannelly sort 
of a world. 

My principal nurse was an old maid. This 
old maid did not understand me at all; and she 
came very near bringing me to an untimely end. 
I was wrapped in cushions and feathers so deep 
I could hardly get my breath. I had on, to 
start with, two flannel binders and one linen 
binder full of stickers; and over these a little 
white shirt, and over this two flannel petti- 
coats, and over all this a dress longer than the 


I Was Born. 


3i 


moral law. My lungs would not act. My 
stomach was so wrapped with the bandages that 
I threw up everything they poured down me. 
There was no room inside for' anything. I 
cried, of course, nearly all the time. This old 
maid, Nancy Perkins, thought I had the colic, 
and that my stomach must be out of fix. So it 
was. It was cramped. It was collapsed by 
outside pressure. She kept the room very dark. 
She kept my head covered up, except when she 
would lift the cover off for a minute to see if I 
was dead. Then I would get a fresh breath, 
and get one delightful snap at the sunlight. 
She stuffed me with gruel and milk-toddy. O 
that toddy — that infernal toddy! It made my 
brain reel. It made me drunk. It grafted into 
my flesh the alcoholic life that I have had to 
fight all my days. I love liquor now better 
than bread. I dare not touch it. I do not keep 
it about me. So I say I was abused. I was 
sinned against through the ignorance of an old 
maid, who ought to have been better endowed. 
A new-born baby has a right to a fair chance. 
Give that baby some fresh air. Give it sun- 
light, Let it have an opportunity to fight that 
ghost of a baby’s life, “the thing to do.” 

My mother was proud of me. She laughed 
at me through her tears. This was in the day 


32 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


when motherhood in honorable wedlock, with 
all women, was a glory. Her womanly instincts 
were too strong, and her conscience too quick, to 
take my life before I was born. She was will- 
ing to reach out into the dark and struggle with 
God for a life. 

My name was put on me next morning. I 
was named after my grandfathers on both sides. 
One was a Yankee, who came to Indiana by an 
Indian trail ; and the other was a Scotchman, 
who had called his braes on the Highlands. The 
fact that I received my name so soon means 
that I was regarded only with the ordinary af- 
fection of matter-of-fact parents. They were 
not silly over me; to which, if they had been 
inclined, they had no time. The English lan- 
guage is hardly equal to the naming of the most 
ordinary baby in these times. Parents put it 
off for months for fear some mistake will be 
made. Then there are so many silly names 
now. Reuben Rodney — there is some strength 
in that. A name is either a help or a hindrance 
to character. It does not make or break, but it 
helps or hinders. Great men have been sent to 
the limbo of oblivion, simply because the pub- 
lic could never learn their names. If there be 
as much expression and meaning in the higher 
harmonies as the musicians say, there must be 


I Was Born. 


33 


something in the vocal effects of a name. I 
was always satisfied with my name. It was a 
little too heavy for the first five years ; but after 
that it became more and more serviceable. Any 
child of which anything is expected ought to 
have a full-grown name. It has a right to this, 
and it is grievously sinned against if it does not 
get it. 

I was not rocked in a sugar-trough. I was 
pinned up in a pillow, and laid in the rocking- 
chair. And this very thing came very near 
being the end of me. Uncle Linus Hickum 
came over one day, and being near-sighted he 
was about to take my chair ; when mother threw 
a spoon at him, and Nancy Perkins yanked him 
into the corner so vigorously that he stepped on 
the side of the frying pan, and the handle flew 
up and whacked him on the head. Uncle Linus 
did not understand this, and he did not wait for 
an explanation. He went out of the house fight- 
ing mad. He regarded it as a premeditated and 
unprovoked attack on him. When there are 
blind people in the neighborhood, never put the 
baby in the rocking-chair. 

When I was three years old I was full size, 
and had come to dexterous use of my legs and 
hands and tongue. My senses were all alert, 
and I received many strange and curious impres- 


34 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

sions. As all children do, I lived in a realistic 
world. What succession of unreal appearances! 
What fascination by the incomprehensible! 
What strange impressions were made by the 
powerful and vast forces in both nature and life ! 
What a time for spontaneous belief! I was not 
able to veil my thoughts from the barnyard 
animals. They would interpret my purposes 
and thwart my plans. There was one cow in 
the wood lot whose features were very much like 
Nancy Perkins’s, and this cow could tell what I 
was thinking about whenever she saw me. 
Many a time I have kept out of her sight to 
keep her from knowing what I intended to do. 
One day I found the forearm, carpal, metacarpal, 
and phalanges bones of a human skeleton in a 
box under the edge of the bed. This, I learned 
afterward, was the property of an uncle, who 
was then a student of medicine. These bones 
attracted me; but I could hold them but a min- 
ute till the fingers would begin to move, and 
they would keep it up till I would lay them 
down. A score of times I tried this, and with 
no more success at the last than the first. I 
saw the movement of those fingers as if living, 
plainly as I ever saw anything. 

One evening, as the sun had gone behind 
the trees in the west, I was sitting on father’s 


I Was Born. 


35 


knee in the doorway. In those cabin times it 
was a common thing to sit in the door, and look 
out on the beauty of nature at nightfall. To-day 
people shut out nature, and feast on works of art 
on the inside. There is not much inside beauty 
in a cabin, but nature had as many charms for 
the soul then as now. Along the covert of the 
bushes and the pasture-fence our chickens were 
feeding, and a flock of crows were there, hop- 
ping on the ground and from stake to stake: 

Father said: “Look there, Rodney; our 
chickens are turning to crows.” 

So it was then to me. One after another 
the chickens would fly a few feet from the 
ground, turn black and fly away. Nothing 
clearer as a matter of sensuous evidence ever 
appeared to me. 

I attributed volition to the bending to and 
fro of the trees in the wind. I endowed all na- 
ture, not only with life, but with feeling and 
thought and purpose. I did this without know- 
ing what I was doing. I did not know at all 
that I was separate and distinct from the stones 
and birds and trees. It was a mythological age 
to me. I was a small-sized idolater. Bishop 
Taylor says that the children of Africa are not 
born heathen. Children are born that in Amer- 
ica. Civilization is not hereditary with the in- 


36 I^ife on a Backwoods Farm. 

dividual. Every Saxon scion is born a raw 
heathen. He is a little ignoramus, with a few 
instincts and nerve-centers, and with an original 
equipment of truth nothing in advance of the 
pickaninnies of Africa. His first look around 
the room is a universe of exploration. He has 
intimations of spiritual truth, but they do not 
come to consciousness straightway. The things 
his senses take in, and the meanings he first gets, 
are the prophecies of truth farther ahead. His 
first impressions of the world are largely mis- 
leading. The views of a child are taken as 
from a telescope with an unsettled surface 
ground, and he gets a blurred image. But the 
child as a knowledge-gatherer has almost infinite 
possibilities. We are great blunderers here. 
We grope our way through mazes of phenomena 
from which no absolute truth can be taken, be- 
cause absolute truth is never known except by 
authority, or through knowledge of all relation- 
ships. We live in a shadow-land. We see 
parts of nature’s meaning. We are never more 
than a handbreadth from intolerable mystery. 
But we grow. We feed on the truth. It is the 
essence of our immortality. The future is an 
open highway. 







































p - • 



















BLACK ME, THEN.” 




CHAPTER III. 


THE BLACK GOD. 


“A thousand volumes in a thousand tongues 
Enshrine the lessons of experience.” 


— M. F. Tupper. 



HE age of swiftest acquisition for a boy is 


1 at about five. He is then a wholesale gath- 
erer of facts. He is a living interrogation point. 
He is then the butt of jokes, and most frequently 
a general nuisance. He is too small to spank, 
and just won’t mind. He is heedless of the 
things you tell him. He never knows that the 
corner of the table is sharp or that the poker is 
hot. He never thinks to take care of his fin- 
gers when he shuts the door. He never goes 
around a mud-puddle in the yard. He gets 
flogged by the turkey-gobbler, and a thousand 
like things happen him. A boy suffers too 
much from not knowing anything, from five to 


37 


38 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

six, to have much of a good time. He does not 
eat his white bread just then. 

The element of distrust also is frequently 
driven into the child-life, like a prod of cold 
steel. It always hurts. It sometimes kills. It 
is an intense pain to a child to discover the 
treachery of the world. 

In our neighborhood there lived one Negro. 
Shalem was his name. He had no other that 
any one knew. There was nothing more to it 
fore or aft. He said that was all there was of it. 

Shalem had a wife and two small boys. 
There was little disposition among the whites 
to tolerate this crowd. Nigger equality was the 
highest crime in the decalogue. Work was 
scarce for Shalem. But he lived better on less 
work than any one in the country. Father had 
a coal-mine ; and it was agreed that the coal- 
mine was a suitable place for Shalem to work. 
It suited his complexion. Shalem’s two boys 
were my first playmates. They were seven and 
eight respectively, and I was five. To say that 
these boys were black is a feeble expression. 
They were like Brother Gardner’s wife, “about 
two shades darker than coal-tar.” Their faces 
glistened in the sun. To me, they were inde- 
scribably interesting, because they were black 
and I was white. Not knowing anything about 


The Beack God. 


39 


color or “previous condition of servitude,” I was 
open to all the influences that might come down 
on me from these two boys. 

We had stabled our stick horses, one day, by 
a burnt log in the clearing, and I asked them 
what made them black. 

They answered that God did, and that all the 
best people in the world were made black. 

“ Nobody around here is black but you.” 

“And nobody is first-class but us.” 

“Are you better than anybody else?” 

“ We are blacker and more beautiful ; God is 
a black man with curly hair.” 

“How did God make you black?” 

“He took black off of a log like this, and 
rubbed it on us ; and we can black you with that 
log, and make you look like us, and you will be 
ever so much finer.” 

“ Well, then, black me.” 

No sooner said than done. They blacked 
me, hands and face and neck and feet. The 
charcoal, rubbed with coarse palms, brought the 
blood from my face in a place or two; but it was 
a case in which the end justified the means, and 
I stood it without a cry. 

“Now,” said Pogus, the older boy, “run 
home and ask your mother if you are not a very 
fine boy.” 


40 Lifk on a Backwoods Farm. 

I went home, but on the way I had a sort of 
creepy feeling that it was not all right. Mother 
saw me coming, and took fright. I ran after 
her. She ran faster. I screamed and yelled. 
After her I went, through the house and around 
it, down by the garden gate and back again. 
She fairly flew. I flew after her, and also flew 
all to pieces. She did not appear to me to run, 
but to glide over the ground and through the 
doors. It seemed to me that if I did not catch 
her I would die. I have never since put forth 
more exertion in anything. Every emotion of 
which I was capable came to me each moment. 
I cried. My agony became too deep for tears. 
I ran. I stopped. I stamped my feet. I tore my 
hair. I ordered her to stop. I cried for father. 
I told the black God to stop her. Finally she 
went exhausted into a chair near the wash- 
bowl and towel. She washed me awhile, and 
then took fright again. I caught her, and held 
to her dress while she scoured the black off. 
Mother then saw she had gone too far with her 
part of the sport, and she crooned over me with 
gentle words; but the agony of the fright was 
still on me; ugly specters filled my brain; the 
world turned black; my mother’s face turned 
black, and I was about to run ’from her, when 
she caught me up and hid my face in her bosom, 


The Beack God. 


4i 


and kept it there till I went to sleep. The 
greatest issues of my life to-day will not have so 
deep an influence on my nature as this little in- 
cident. It affected me so profoundly that my 
mental characteristics must in part be inter- 
preted by it. A flesh-wound will soon heal, and 
only a flesh-scar remains. An overwrought 
mental excitement leaves its mark to last for- 
ever. 


CHAPTER IY. 


CRUELTY AND TREACHERY. 

“ Not at once, 

In men or angels, the abhorrent plague 
Appeared in all its loathsomeness. But as 
In some fair virgin’s bosom a small spot, 

As if a thorn had pricked the delicate skin, 

Rises and spreads an ever-fretting sore, 

Creeping from limb to limb, corrosive, foul, 

Until the miserable leper lives 
A dying life, and dies a living death : 

So there.” 

—Edward Henry Bickersteth. 

T HE summer following tlie episode with the 
darky boys, I had my first experience with 
the real treachery of this old world. Nancy 
Perkins, the old maid, liked our house when she 
first came. She liked the work, she liked the 
folks, she liked the baby. She soon concluded 
to become a fixture in the family, and so she 
staid year after year, and I never knew a time 


Crueety and Treachery. 


43 


when I did not know Nancy. She did her 
work well, drew her pay, and was a kind soul 
with all her finicky notions and fussiness. She 
liked me, and never tired of telling of her suc- 
cess with me the first few days of my life; when 
the fact is, it is a wonder I did not die on her 
hands. If I had died, the death would have been 
attributed to a mysterious providence, and not 
to Nancy; for she did her best with me, and 
through this six years of my life her devotion 
to me never relaxed. I suffered quite a good 
deal because of her old maidishness; for her 
prim notions of propriety did not fit me at all. 
To fit a boy, the thing has to be cut to fit; and 
a boy knows a misfit as soon as he sees it. My 
mother did not turn my training over to Nancy, 
however, and so I was not warped in that direc- 
tion. What an inheritance, that a child is born 
to the care of its own mother ! What a curse 
must fall on any woman who relieves herself of 
the care of her own children by turning them 
over to hired nurses ! She robs her own soul of 
one of its highest opportunities, and commits a 
multitude of other sins. 

Every now and then I would have quite a 
time of it with Nancy; for I was not three years 
old till I learned that she was not the boss of 
me, and I always rebelled against any delegated 


44 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


powers she claimed to have. When I was with 
Nancy — that is, left to her keeping — I always 
did as I pleased, except that of getting into 
danger. Then she was not slow to use force; 
and I was not slow to resent that sort of thing, 
by kicking her shins and pounding her in the 
face with my fists. She rather enjoyed my 
spunk, and made it the occasion of investing 
herself with greater responsibility concerning 
me. She was always as fussy as an old hen 
with one chicken, doing clucking and scratch- 
ing enough for a brood of forty. I know I was 
a joy to Nancy’s life, and I know I did not in- 
tend it. I liked her in spite of myself, but I 
took all her devotedness as a matter of course. 

One day father came from the stable with 
five kittens in a sack; and before I could empty 
them out on the floor and take possession, 
father said: 

“Hold on, Rodney; I have a job for you and 
Nancy. You must take these kittens down to the 
narrow bridge, and throw them in the canal. 
Drowning is the easiest death, and we will 
never be mean enough to take a sack of cats to 
a neighbor’s. What do you say, Nancy?” 

“All right” said Nancy. “They would soon 
come to the house, and I am not going to have 
them here.” 


Cruelty and Treachery. 45 

That afternoon we took the kittens and 
started down the wood-road to the narrow 
bridge, less than a half mile. The water in 
which the kittens were to be drowned w^s that 
of the Wabash and Erie Canal, one of the great- 
est material enterprises in the history of the 
State of Indiana. In fact, it was too great for 
the State to complete, and it was given up, as a 
public enterprise, before it was near finished. 
After spending millions on it, the State gave it 
into the hands of an English company, who took 
it, with an enormous grant of land; and it was 
finally completed. This canal extended from 
Evansville, by way of Terre Haute and Lafay- 
ette, to the Ohio line in the northern part of the 
State. It was an heroic work for a pioneer age. 
The whole Commonwealth had great expecta- 
tion from it at one time. The ditch was dug; 
the locks were made, many of them erected in 
the finest masonry; and boats were running over 
parts of the line, — and by the time all this was 
done, it was about demonstrated that the rail- 
road was a feasible and possible thing for all 
these States and Territories. The bottom did 
not fall out of the canal, but, as a consequence, 
the heart went out of the builders and owners. 
They practically let it go from the start. See- 
ing it would not pay expenses, they let it get 


46 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

out of repair, and in the course of a few years 
it went down. 

The narrow bridge to which we were going 
was not the crossing bridge of a public road, 
but a company bridge, to transfer the mules 
from one bank to the other at a place where 
the exigencies of engineering made it neces- 
sary to change sides for the tow-path. These 
mules were hitched to a long rope, with the 
other end fastened to the bow of the canal- 
boat. The company’s orders were to unhitch 
the mules from the tow-rope in transferring 
them ; but in a slow movement of the boat it 
was possible to rush the mules across the bridge, 
and drive them down under and reach the bank 
on the other side before the boat would go 
through far enough to tighten the rope on the 
mules. It was a forbidden transaction, which 
had something of the dangers of a running 
switch. This day, as we made the last turn in the 
wood-road, and were brought suddenly in sight 
of the bridge, two mules hitched tandem were 
approaching the farther end of it, and the boat 
was slowly moving down the channel. Behind 
the mules was a lazy-looking driver, with a long 
gad. As the mules approached the bridge the 
driver began to ply his gad vigorously to rush 
the animals across and under before the boat 


Cruelty and Treachery. 


47 


would tighten the tow-rope. The front mule 
shied at the foot of the bridge and hindered 
him a moment, and that was long enough to let 
the boat overtake him. The boat was clear 
under by the time the mules were in the center, 
and about two-thirds across they were both 
pulled from the bridge into the canal. They 
fell a distance of twenty feet. What a splash ! 
Poor animals; the victims of a lazy and trifling 
driver ! John Wesley believed that animals 
live forever. I hope it is true. If those two 
mules come up against that scamp in the day 
of judgment, he will not get inside the gates. 
Shame on a man who will hazard or take the 
life of a poor dumb brute in that way! One of 
these mules came to the surface, and was taken 
out, but it was a cripple. The other tangled in 
the harness head downward, and was drowned. 

As the two mules went over the bridge, 
Nancy caught me by the hand and started on a 
full run to the house; partly in fright, partly to 
tell the news; but she made me take some long 
steps. It seemed to me I only touched the 
ground now and then. She arrived out of 
breath. I arrived somewhat stove up. The 
kittens arrived. 

The question of cruelty to animals now 
came up, and the death of the kittens was about 


48 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

to be indefinitely postponed till father made a 
very strong argument in favor of his first plan. 
So next morning we started for the bridge again. 
Instead of putting a stone in the sack, we untied 
it and poured them out from the top of the 
bridge into the water. Four of them soon 
sank; but one made for the shore and reached 
it. We caught it and threw it back. Three 
times we repeated this, and each time that kit- 
ten made such a wonderful fight for its life, and 
with every breath made such a pitiful plea, that 
my heart, steeled for the work till now, was 
completely broken. Nancy was taking the little 
thing for what would have been its last trial, 
for it was now exhausted and hardly able to 
breathe. I slipped up behind her, snatched it 
from her hand, and^ran with all my might out 
the road towards the house. I was a hundred 
yards from the canal before she overtook me; 
and then I was ready to make war on Nancy if 
she touched me. We returned with the kitten. 
It showed its gratitude by becoming a famous cat. 

The building of this canal required many 
more workmen than the country through which 
it was being built could furnish ; and along the 
route — sometimes by the contractors, and some- 
times by the workmen themselves — were built 


Cruelty and Treachery. 49 

log cabins and huts to shelter the men, and often 
their families. After the work was done, it was 
no infrequent thing to find a man too poor to 
get away, and he became a permanent citizen. 
This sort of thing brought an admixture of bad 
blood to the communities along the route of the 
canal. In one of these huts lived a man who 
had two boys and a sick wife. The cabin was 
in the east limits of Hazelgreen, not fifty feet 
away from the stone locks. The body of the 
lock, which was large enough to receive the 
boats, formed a great hollow, around which the 
water made its way and poured from the waste- 
way, falling ten feet or more into the depths be- 
low. This falling water made such a noise that 
it could be heard frequently from our house. I 
had never seen it, but had formed great ideas 
about it. 

The day after we came from the bridge, I 
went with mother to help carry some delicacies 
to this sick woman, the wife of Jack Hardy. 
While she was feeding the sick woman, I went 
with the two boys, both older than myself, down 
to the lock. I saw the water rolling over the 
stone dam into the foam below. It was to me a 
veritable Niagara. The roar and froth and hol- 
low echo of the waters from the caverns of the 
lock produced in me the most dreadful feelings. 


50 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


What is that sublime and awful thing in the 
falling of water? It is a noise which has not 
been set to any music, but it must take its 
place somewhere among the harmonies. It has 
in it a sublimity that always moves the soul. 
Neither does it require the cultured ear to be 
enthralled by it. You simply stand still and 
in silence. You wonder as it sways you, with- 
out knowing why. The savage will stand by 
the cataract and listen to its roar till his super- 
stitions drive him away. My childish spirit 
was taken up into the fearful splash and roar 
of that artificial cataract. In the steep em- 
bankment of solid clay these two boys had 
cut steps, forming a sort of stairway leading 
down to the water’s edge. I was much attracted 
by this terraced work in going down, but lost 
thought of it in the roar of the water. To my 
consternation, as soon as I was down the two 
boys turned on me for a quarrel. One of them 
said : 

“Bub, do you want to fight?” 

“Not down here, where I am scared at this 
water.” 

“Then you are a coward.” 

“No, I am not a coward.” 

“O, we will see ! We will put you into this 
water. This place is ours down here anyhow.” 






. 




U 




HERE YOU GO NOW. 










Cruelty and Treachery. 51 

With that, they caught me, each boy taking 
an arm and a leg, and they dipped me down in 
the water till I was thoroughly wet. Then 
they stood me in the edge of the canal with my 
back to the water, and each boy put his foot on 
one of mine. Mashing both my feet in the 
mud, they would push me backward into the 
water. Then they took each a foot and a hand 
again, and began to swing me out over the 
water towards the cataract. Once they swung 
me, and then they said : 

“Now, next time we will let you go — here 
you go now.” 

That was death to me as deeply as I ever 
expect to feel it. I suffered a death without 
meeting it. With the second swing out, I knew 
no more. I was suddenly in a strange and 
glorious place — trees, birds, sunshine, happy 
people, landscapes of beauty, swards of green 
as smooth as velvet carpet, and entrancing 
music. I was enraptured with every vision 
that met my childish eyes. On a silk rug at my 
feet I saw, snugged up together, the four kittens 
we had drowned at the bridge the day before. I 
became drowsy and tired, and I lay down on the 
silk rug, and bent myself around the four kit- 
tens, and went to sleep. 

The next I knew I was at home in the high 


52 


IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 


bed, and my mother was bending over me, 
asking : 

“How is my boy now?” 

“ I do n’t know.” 

“How did my child fall in the water?” 

“ I did not fall in the water.” 

Mother did not hear my screams for help; but 
when she was ready for home she came to hunt 
me, and found me lying on the bank, uncon- 
scious. The boys told her that I had fallen in 
the water, and they had taken me out. 

The whole affair came to me, and I told her 
how it was. Mother went to the door, and 
called father from the field. They held a short 
conversation at the door. Father’s face turned 
ashen pale. He put his ax down by the step, 
handed his coat to mother, and started for town. 
Mother said : 

“See about it, Reuben ; but keep your senses 
when you see Jack Hardy.” 

Before he reached town his better judgment 
was enthroned ; so he found Jack, who was half 
drunk. He gave him the case, and told him to 
go home and punish his two scamps. Jack was 
sober enough to know what that meant, and he 
followed directions to the letter; but it did no 
good. The fact is, when that sort of thing is in 
children who are old enough to know right from 


Cruelty and Treachery. 53 

wrong, it is seldom anything else than the 
prophecy of a bad end. 

Have yon any interest in knowing what be- 
came of these boys? They lived to be men. A 
few years ago I stood by the bedside of one of 
them, and saw him die fighting snakes and wild 
animals in the awfulness of delirium tremens. I 
saw him slam the door of time behind him with 
a curse on his lips. The other is now a con- 
vict for life in the Iowa State Prison. 

The dread I had when these boys were 
throwing me out over the water was not of 
physical suffering. The crown of my agony 
was in the wrong of the thing suffered at the 
hands of these young villains. A few notes will 
express the limit of physical pain and the 
dread of it ; but a scale of notes, reaching from 
earth to perdition, can alone express the pos- 
sible suffering of the spirit. How the world 
changes! How life changes as a child emerges 
from the covert of the home, where it has never 
known anything but the forces that have been 
true, and steps into the edge of a world of buffet, 
heartless and full of deception and treachery ! 
To have any experience in this world is to learn to 
doubt. Distrust becomes a part of the armor of 
protection to the successful. “ Know your man 
before you trust him,” is a wise business maxim. 


54 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

“ And after that, keep your weather eye open,” 
is the caution that any extensive business ex- 
perience would add to it. The spirit of con- 
fidence in human forces in this world may be 
growing stronger, but experience with men 
puts in us the element of distrust, and we can 
not help it. To doubt, therefore, has value. 
Those who never doubt, those who insist on be- 
lieving that all men are honest, usually get 
stranded in the stream of life. When it is 
known that you trust every man, about every 
other man you meet will be a confidence man. 
Distrust this world, and hold it at bay until you 
can take care of your own. Successful business 
men have largely developed the element of 
caution. Do not distrust God as you distrust 
men. There is no treachery in him. He will 
not cheat. He will not take short cuts. 

Children usually get their taste of the false 
in life by tid-bits. They move out into it by 
way of little eye-openers and surprises. They 
get it in installments. I got the full measure 
of mine with my first experience. Through the 
years I have looked on that fact as something 
of a misfortune. Its pressure on me was too 
great at too early an age. It fell on me like a 
dull thud, and has left in me the traces of iron. 
The springs and modulations of my whole life 


Treachery and Crueety. 55 

have been dulled by it, so that on one hand, I 
am robbed of much enjoyment, and on the other 
I am too keenly susceptible to certain qualities of 
exquisite pain. The spirit of resistance toward 
those who oppose me has been intensified and 
too determined by it. It has left in me a 
shrinking feeling toward the surface antago- 
nisms of life, and, unfortunately, it has helped 
to possess me with a coolness and a stoical in- 
difference in the face of a danger that threatens 
death, which is certainly abnormal. At no 
other time since, when in imminent danger of 
death, have I felt the least excitement. I felt the 
spiritual tremor of death that day at the canal- 
lock, and I never expect to feel it again. 



CHAPTER Y. 

JOE CONEER, THE CRAZY MAN. 

“ Sorrow that made the reason drunk, and yet 
Left much untasted — so the cup was filled ; 

Sorrow that like an ocean, dark, deep, rough, 

And shoreless, rolled its billows o’er the soul 
Perpetually, and without hope of end.” 

— Pollok. 

“ Extreme mind is close to extreme insanity.” 

—Pascal. 

“ Since when have I shown signs of insanity ?” 

— Cato. 

“ Great wit to madness nearly is allied.” 

— Dryden. 

W HILE we are under the head of the reflex 
power of circumstances on the character, 
I want to enter into another matter that in- 
fluenced me greatly. It was the custom for 
the farmers about, to have extra help in the 
spring and summer seasons. One spring father 
hired a man for six months, “ wet and dry.” 
56 


Joe Coneer, the Crazy Man. 57 

His name was Joe Coneer. He was a stalwart 
and mighty man, and he had in him a compan- 
ionable and royal spirit. The first day at 
dinner I made friends with Joe. Father liked 
Joe. We all liked him. He always came to 
the scratch. He was honest with his work; and 
in every way he was a first-class farm-hand. 
He worked the six months, and only lost one 
half-day. The peculiarity about Joe was, that 
at times he was slightly crazy ; not to a degree 
that it interfered with his work, but during the 
months of his stay among us his mental defec- 
tion became more apparent. He would some- 
times whistle a tune at the table, greatly always 
to my amusement. One time this performance 
occurred when we had strange company. Some 
days while at work he would wear his left pant- 
leg rolled up above his knee, until he would 
blister his leg in the sun. In the morning, 
when he went to feed the stock, he would always 
hop from the house to the stable on one foot. 
He would never think of doing such a thing at 
any other time. He had a mortal fear of snakes, 
and would carry a club to be ready for them. He 
would carry this club all day while binding wheat. 
He would lay it down while he tied the bundle, 
and take it up again when going on. Joe never 
killed a snake in his life. One day, while bind- 


58 L,ifk on a Backwoods Farm. 

in g, he came to a bundle, on top of which had 
crawled a little green one about eight inches 
long — the kind we boys use to take and put 
into our pockets. Joe had his club. He sol- 
emnly looked at that snake for a minute, and 
then walked around it and went on to the next 
bundle, saying: “I’ll let you go.” He would 
loan the club to me, and I would kill his snakes 
for him. I had in me the common impulse, and 
I never missed a chance. Kill a snake when 
you see it. Why? Because other people do. 
Because the ancestors of the whole tribe played 
our mother Eve such a mean trick. I ’ll not 
have anything to say about the theology of 
snake-killing ; but it seems to me that man is 
getting overmuch revenge on these poor crawl- 
ing creatures for one little piece of deceit. The 
fact is, Eve wanted the apple. And in the 
spirit of injured innocence her children have 
been pounding this dejected beast into the 
ground ever since. The whole thing lacks 
dignity. 

Toward the close of the summer it was 
thought best by all parties that Joe should spend 
the winter in the asylum. It was mentioned to 
him, and in his lucid moments he would con- 
sent to go, and soon he would change his mind. 
Finally the papers were made out, and one 


Joe Conker, the Crazy Man. 59 

morning the sheriff and his deputy made their 
appearance to take Joe to the asylum. Joe was 
fickle that morning ; he would consent, and then 
refuse. He baffled the officers till it was ap- 
parent that he must be taken by force. This 
put a serious side to things. Father used every 
power of persuasion on Joe, telling him that 
these men meant him no harm, that they were 
his friends, and that they would take good care 
of him, and show him every kindness. 

“And, Joe, you know that at times your mind 
is not qnite right, and you will be cured, and 
we want you to live with us again next 
summer.” 

Joe would say: “I know my mind is not 
right, but I can’t go.” 

“Why, Joe?” 

“Rickets, rickets, rickets — hi ho, hi ho — two 
hops and four snakes, and a tune to match !” 
and Joe turned abruptly around, and, against 
some resistance, went into the house. 

Father and the two men followed in a quan- 
dary. Joe must be tied or no sheriff would 
ever be able to take him. Finally the sheriff 
reached the purpose to take him by force, and 
so ordered father and the deputy to get ready. 
Joe was a physical giant. Lack of mental 
balance seemed to have its compensation in a 


60 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

most perfectly developed and complete physical 
manhood. Father was a stronger man than Joe, 
but could not tie him, and he had doubt if the 
three could do it. At any rate the attempt 
meant danger. The spirit of resistance was 
aroused in Joe, ai;d he threw his hat on the 
bed, clenched his fists, backed himself in the 
corner, and declared his purpose to fight them 
to the bitter end. The three men were a little 
slow to take hold. Mother was advising against 
taking him in the house. To me the scene 
was one of horror. I was not old enough to 
see the importance of taking Joe away, and I 
had heard nothing of the plan and was not pre- 
pared for it. His vagaries to me had not 
reached any other importance than that of an 
entertainment to me. I enjoyed them. Joe 
was different from other men, but his antics had 
to me nothing deeper than the ludicrous. I 
pleaded openly for Joe, and was in the spirit of 
regarding the whole crowd of opposers as my 
enemies, and I had made up mind, if the fight 
came on, to help Joe. The sheriff saw that I 
was giving strength to Joe’s purpose, and he 
ordered me to be quiet. Father sanctioned the 
command of the sheriff ; so I kept quiet, secretly 
intending to help Joe if they undertook to take 
him. There was a change of tactics. Persua- 


Joe Coneer, the Crazy Man. 6i 

sion and threats had now failed, and there was left 
the test of the strength of the influence of one 
will over another. The issue was the actual break- 
ing of the will of one strong man against that 
of another. Joe had shown determination and 
courage, and it was now to be seen if he would 
surrender under the command of the man whom 
he respected and feared. There was a time of 
silence — of awful silence ; but long enough to 
shift the battle from the realm of physical to 
the realm of mental forces. Father stepped 
out in front of Joe, took the buckskin thongs 
from the hands of the sheriff, and deliberately 
laid them straight across his left hand. Then 
he looked Joe in the eyes till they flinched; 
then he said, in the spirit of intense command : 

“Joe, cross your hands.” 

The poor man threw up his hands and 
crossed them, and father tied the thongs, gently 
but firmly about them and delivered him to the 
sheriff. Joe’s face as he crossed his hands is 
with me to this day. It was the double horror 
of reason dethroned and will gone. Unutter- 
able sorrow was the expression of every motion 
of the poor man. But the pallor left his face 
in a moment. His brain was then in confusion ; 
and he began an incoherent and senseless 
jabber that he kept up till he was out of hear- 


62 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


ing down the woodland road. I felt that a cruel 
wrong had been done Joe. No one had ex- 
plained the case to me. I associated the two 
men with the two boys who had swung me out 
toward the cataract. Joe knew how I felt. I 
could not close my eyes that night without see- 
ing that pitiful face. Fitful dreams of the affair 
disturbed my slumber for weeks. 

These circumstances were sobering my life 
too soon. It had been better had I never known 
them. I was beginning to learn sorrow and 
know its reality too soon. To this time I had 
many a little cry over bumps and disappoint- 
ments, but they were like brief showers among 
the trees on a summer day. They were refresh- 
ments more than anything else. But Joe’s face 
photographed itself on me. I do not say it 
threw a shadow into my life, but I believe it 
was not good for me. 

There was no apparent cause for Joe’s mental 
derangement. He was a noble-spirited man, 
and he had about him every mark of the best 
family lineage. No one ever knew whence he 
came. His family history was a complete mys- 
tery. Father was doubtful of the good that 
was to come to him because of the extreme 
pressure put upon him when he was taken, and 


Joe Conker, the Crazy Man. 63 

he was saddened that he had sent Joe from 
him apparently a worse lunatic than ever. 

In six months Joe was pronounced cured, 
and he returned to us for the next summer, 
his idiosyncrasies gone — sobered, perhaps sad- 
dened, by the knowledge that his reason had 
been on the verge of incurable wreck. Joe ap- 
peared to be constantly standing on guard of 
himself, and but few evidences of any mental 
aberration could be noticed. In a few years he 
married a contented, spirited woman, who had 
in her own right forty acres of land. On this 
Joe built a stout, stocky cabin, with palings and 
fencings about ; and finally the whole forty was 
cleared by his own hand. The fences and barn 
and smoke-house, and the cabin itself, were 
regularly whitewashed each spring; and this 
little home became a notable place. He became 
a great home-keeper and an ideal farmer. 
Other farms have been improved about him — 
large, fine houses and barns have been built in 
sight of him all about — but his whitewashed 
cabin stands there to-day in remarkable preser- 
vation ; and the two old people go about their 
work in the fashion of forty years ago. Joe has 
gone past his threescore and ten ; he stands tall 
and erect as an Indian, with a shock of hair as 


64 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

white as snow ; and he has also gone past the 
danger-line of mental wandering. Joe is to-day 
living with a clean mind and a great hope in 
his heart. 

The inside of his cabin is as clean as clean- 
liness itself. His tall form never entered that 
house without receiving a wifely welcome. 
The love of his great heart always responded, 
and the two hearts made one, became a guarantee 
for his reason. 

I want to put down a word here for Joe’s 
wife. Any small degree of domestic trouble 
would have made him a hopeless mental wreck. 
She knew this, and she knew also that he pos- 
sessed the parts of a splendid mind and heart. 
So she made that home an asylum of content- 
ment. She had a deliberate purpose to make 
his heart glad whenever he darkened the door. 
Her service to this great, good man became a 
part of her life, and the thing she did about it 
made her a queenly woman. When any honest 
man comes from his toil to his home, he ought 
to have a welcome. The lack of it has snapped 
the courage of many a strong heart. It has 
sent many a man, soul and body, into the swift 
curves toward hell. 

Joe, of course, was not morally responsible 
when crazy. I never could get away from the 


JOK CONEER, THE CRAZY MAN. 65 

feeling that Joe was good if he was crazy. 
Whether the space covered by his insane hours 
was a blank to him or not, I do not know. 
Whether he looked sorrowfully over the ground 
of his mental wanderings with the first lucid 
moment, and then took up the load of life, or 
whether he started again at the point where 
reason left him, I do not know. Joe acted as if 
he knew, but he was silent about it. There 
was a great longing in Joe’s face all the time. 
He was outwardly cheerful, because after the 
mental storm, with him, there was the clearest 
sunshine of intellectual vision. His mental 
parts, when they were to be seen, were all of 
remarkable force. He could frame a proposi- 
tion, put two together, and draw a conclusion 
with the greatest mental acumen. But all the 
while, when he knew himself, he seemed to 
know a shattered self ; and he appeared to go 
about his work and duty with misgivings. 

What a blessing is reason throned ! What a 
slight thing will wreck an empire ! The wonder 
is, so few people go crazy. There is so much 
drunkenness, so much gluttony, so much over- 
work, so much domestic sorrow, and life is run- 
ning so much like a storm, with no sleep, and in 
hot, relentless pursuit of that which bursts like 
a bauble in the hands as soon as it is gained — 
5 


66 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


what mind- wreckers these ! When the human 
brain itself becomes a burning phosphorous ball, 
never to sink to rest till it is consumed — what 
wonder the mastery of self-government so fre- 
quently goes ; what wonder the taut nerves 
snap, and leave the soul to frenzy and madness ! 
What a strain the moral excesses of man con- 
stantly put on mental integrity ! 

Joe would never tell, but he knew what made 
him crazy. His mind had gone deep into some 
trouble before he came to our country. He 
had thrown it off, for he did not brood over it ; 
but to throw it off cost him his steady ballast 
of reason. It might have done him good to tell 
his secret to some one. One day, as we were 
sitting on a log in the woods pasture, I thought 
he had opened his lips to speak of the hidden 
thing ; but he became silent suddenly, and we 
walked home without exchanging a word. I 
am sure of one thing — Joe’s madness was not for 
any wrong in himself, unless it was for not 
throwing his burden off till it wrecked him. 

The wreck of reason in Joe’s case was not 
so great as to affect his character. The day- 
light of the world — a chance to build a char- 
acter — was not taken from Joe. 

Power of self-control — that is the balance- 


Joe Coneer, the Crazy Man. 67 

wheel of reason. Whenever self-dominion goes, 
we are madmen. A fit of anger — is not that 
madness? Gather up all the finest faculties, 
and compute them, and what are they worth 
then? In what is reason better than lunacy in 
the moment it is dethroned? The sun of the 
soul goes behind a cloud then. Manliness gives 
way. The spirit passes through a storm just 
then. The man is not insane, but short of 
sanity. The soundest mind in a few leaps 
will be in the border-land of frenzy. Passion, 
tempest-sprung, is a wild horse without bit or 
bridle, on which we are tied ; and we always 
take a Mazeppa’s ride. Keep your temper — 
above everything, keep your temper. Good 
Lord, give us “ the spirit of a sound mind !” 

After Joe left our house, I grew out of his 
knowledge. I have seen him many a time on 
the road, in the city, on his farm at work ; and 
at times I have surmised that he knew me as 
well as I knew him, but cared not to keep up 
an acquaintance that called up the saddest 
memories. Through this forty years I have not 
cared to renew his acquaintance. I know he is 
a manly man. He impressed his spirit 011 my 
child-mind. I think I know him thoroughly 
well. I know him on the inside. I re-name 


68 


Lifk on a Backwoods Farm. 


him Joseph Greatheart. What I know of him 
has put a thread of melancholy in my life ; but 
it has not had the effect to take the springs of 
purpose out of me, but to encourage me the 
rather. If I hear of Joe’s death in time, I will 
go to the funeral. 



CHAPTER VI. 

JIM HANDY, THE VILLAIN. 

“ Envy, eldest born of hell, imbrued 
Her hands in blood, and taught the sons of men 
To make a death which nature never made. 

And God abhorred, with violence rude, to break 
The thread of life ere half its length was run, 

And rob a brother of its being.” 

— PORTEUS. 

“ Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion, all the interim is 
Tike a phantasma, or a hideous dream.” 

— Shakespeare. 

T^ATHER had a half-brother, Welborn Blan- 
^ nerhassett, who lived three miles to the 
northeast of us, across the canal and beyond 
the breaks of Honey Creek. He was a man of 
splendid parts. He had friends everywhere, 
and no known enemies. He possessed both 

business ability and public spirit. He was a 

69 


70 I^ifk on a Backwoods Farm. 

leader in the community, and very popular. 
As a man and citizen his praise was on all 
lips. But his wife was a vixen. She was 
coarse and uncouth in appearance, and a bad 
spirit. She was morose and scowling and dis- 
satisfied. What possessed Uncle Welborn to 
marry her, I do not know. If men always ex- 
ercised good judgment in selecting wives, some 
women would never get married at all — a state- 
ment as completely true when turned the other 
way. They say John Wesley married a regular 
old hectoration. I don’t know about that; but 
I do know that Uncle Welborn was sorrowfully 
mismated. He was refined in spirit, and am- 
bitious for the best things ; she was slovenly, 
with a mind full of vulgarities, and having no 
ambition but for her own ease. She had no 
capacity to appreciate him, and it was her de- 
light to make him miserable. What he thought 
no one ever knew — he was simply silent. No 
word of disparagement of his wife ever escaped 
him. His provision for her was on the prin- 
ciple of taking her “ for better or for worse.” 
In this case it was “ for worse.” Uncle Wel- 
born did the work in the house and in the 
field. She was too lazy to work, too lazy to 
keep herself clean. She sat in her old chair, 
played sick, and smoked her pipe, and got as 


Jim Handy, the Viddain. 71 

fat as a hog. This woman had a brother, Jim 
Handy — another gloomy and, many believed, an 
evil spirit — who wandered up and down the 
country, a general and worthless vagabond. 
Elenor — that was uncle’s wife’s name — wanted 
this graceless scamp to have right of way to all 
that was on the farm and in the house. For 
years Uncle Welborn had practically supported 
Jim. One day Jim was informed that he must 
henceforth provide for himself. That was a 
piece of disagreeable news to Jim. There was 
no quarrel. Uncle Welborn was never known 
to quarrel with his wife. When she railed out 
on him, he whistled. A thousand times he had 
whistled her out of court. A day or so after 
this notice to Jim to quit the premises, uncle 
had retired early, and had gone to sleep. Elenor 
was still up, pottering in and out, and Jim was 
still up, when Uncle Welborn’s skull was crushed 
with his own ax. Neither of these two saw any 
sign of any one going or coming. They heard 
no noise of any kind. The ax had been re- 
turned to the wood-pile, and deliberately stuck 
into the end of a log. Elenor had been in the 
room once after the deed was done, and had not 
noticed it, she said. When it was discovered, 
she started Jim to our house ; but he got lost, 
and never did his errand. He had to this time 


72 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

been playing crazy for several months. He was 
so foxy sharp that he made a few believe he 
was demented. Jack Graham, returning from 
town, was called in, and brought father the news, 
and also went for the doctor. 

Father took a dim path through the woods 
to a crossing in the canal, where a canoe was 
kept. The canoe was on the opposite side from 
him, and he had to swim the canal. He reached 
the house about three o’clock in the morning. 
Elenor was there alone with the murdered man. 
She had done nothing to him, nor for him. She 
was sitting in the corner in a sullen way, smok- 
ing her pipe. Father says : 

“Where is Welborn; is he dead?” 

“ No, he is not dead.” 

Then she affected to cry. She did not cry ; 
she only whined. Father went to the bed. 
There was a slow and labored breathing — noth- 
ing more. He saw the depression in his fore- 
head, and knew what the weapon was. He 
went to the wood-pile, found the ax, and brought 
it in, and saw plainly that it had been used. 
By this time two physicians were there. Before 
daylight the skull-bone was lifted, and uncle 
was lucid for a moment. 

Father said to him : 
v “ How was it done, Welborn?” 


Jim Handy, the Vieeain. 73 

“What, Reuben?” 

“ Your skull has been crushed with your 
own ax.” 

“ I know nothing about it. Will I die?” 

“ The doctors say so. Have you anything 
to say?” 

“ No, nothing. I did not know I had such 
an enemy. I would have preferred a natural 
death — tried to live an honest life — coast clear — 
coast clear — g-o-o-d-b-y-e.” 

He had no more rational moments. Before 
the work of the physicians was finished, Jim re- 
turned, having given up trying to find the way 
to our house. 

Neither Jim nor Elenor approached the bed 
during Welborn’s last words. Father noticed 
their glances at each other, and their consterna- 
tion that he should ever speak again. Is there 
such a thing as knowing a fact without know- 
ing it — that is, without evidence that a court 
would receive? 

Father walked from the bedside across the 
room to where old Jim stood, put his fist in his 
face, and said to him: 

“No wonder you lost your way last night, 
you old scoundrel. You did that deed.” 

Old Jim blanched, nearly fell backward over 
a chair, mumbled something through his nose 


74 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


and teeth, and inside of five minutes he was out 
in the dark without coat or hat, and gone. He 
broke into the woods, and was not heard of for 
a month. He wandered through the timbered 
country about thirty miles, and found harbor 
with another branch of his family, who pro- 
posed to unite in the plea that Jim was crazy; 
so no arrest was made. 

All this is incidental to my own interest, in 
what followed. Father’s accusation brought in 
Jim the spirit of revenge. He declared openly 
that he would take father’s life. 

It appeared that Elenor’s selfishness defeated 
Jim’s purpose. He expected to live with Elenor 
after Uncle Welborn’s death, knowing that the 
farm would support them both. Father’s unex- 
pected accusation to his face changed his plans 
somewhat, and he was afraid to return to the 
region of the murder to look after his own in- 
terests. Father became administrator of the 
estate, and induced Elenor to sell the farm, 
take the money, and move from the country. 
Where she went, no one knew. No one made 
any inquiry. No one cared, except as a matter 
of curiosity. The sale of this farm, and the de- 
parture of Elenor was a part of father’s plan lor 
the defeat of old Jim. The murder was not of 
malice at first. It was of laziness. Jim was too 


Jim Handy, the Viddain. 75 

lazy to work. In a bungling way he played 
crazy to keep from work. He killed Uncle 
Welborn as a part of an ill-conceived plan to 
keep from work. When he found that the farm 
had been sold, and Elenor had pocketed the 
money and had gone, his wrath knew no bounds. 
He had escaped prosecution from one murder 
under the insanity dodge, and he felt safe in the 
plot of another. Old Jim, by some means, came 
into possession of a good gun, which he carried 
constantly in his tramps over the country. He 
only gave one reason for carrying that gun. 
That was to kill father. He lived a week or so 
at a place, wherever the people would keep him. 
His movements were mysterious. No one ever 
knew his plans ahead. There was only one 
thing in his future, — that was to kill Rube Blan- 
nerhassett. Many friends gave father warning. 
There were times when old Jim would be seen 
coming into the neighborhood, and father would 
receive news of it by some one solicitous for him. 
Father was not afraid of old Jim in open con- 
flict. To have the matter over, he would have 
preferred open war with him. This, however, 
would have been an unequal contest. It would 
have been a life of value hazarded in almost 
equal chances with a life of no value. 

Some advised father to relieve himself and 


76 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

the community by the short way known to all 
of them. His reply to these indiscreet friends 
was : 

“ I shall never take a human life, except in 
self-defense.” 

Others believed old Jim was slightly crazy, 
and would never carry out his threat. Father’s 
theory was that Jim was not crazy at all. 
The physicians were convinced of his sanity. 
When father boldly charged him with the crime, 
it was so startling a thing to his mind that he 
forgot to play lunatic, and blanched and trem- 
bled over the horror of being detected. 

So matters went on. There was no way to 
change the dread suspense of things. Old Jim 
had the field, and all the advantages of a shrewd 
game of lunacy. There was nothing for father 
to do but to go about his business. He went 
armed for a time. This was very inconvenient 
for a business man, and, besides, it looked cow- 
ardly. It was only for a few months that father 
pretended to keep himself in readiness for the 
man who had sworn vengeance. But it was 
during this time that the whole affair became 
known to me. It came about in the following 
way: Father had some hewed timber to haul 
from the woods — the framework of a large barn. 
Old Jim knew this, and father thought that if 


Jim Handy, the Vieeain. 77 

he intended to carry out his purpose, it would 
be at some time when he was getting out this 
timber. 

In these trips into the woods I was taken 
along to hold the horses, and to put the chock 
under the handspike, as father, first with his 
weight, then with a lift, would bring the hewed 
timber up against the axle with the aid of a 
log-chain. The trusty old rifle always went 
along these trips. I wondered at this, because 
no game was found, and the gun often became 
unhandy. We were driving one day through 
a spur of Honey Creek bottom where the under- 
brush was densest, when a cracking of brush in 
the edge of a pawpaw-patch brought the rifle 
to father’s face in a moment, with an intense 
watchfulness in the direction from which the 
sound came. I was sitting in front, at the 
point of the coupling, driving. I always did 
this, and father always held his gun in his 
hands. I heard the crack of the brush. I 
caught next father’s face pallid with excitement, 
and behind the pallor an awful purpose. 

“ What was it, father?” 

“I guess it must have been a falling limb,” 
he said, as he slowly took his gun from his 
face, but still keeping his eye on the spot. 

“Did you intend to shoot a falling limb?” 


78 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

At this he faintly smiled, and said: 

“ I guess not.” 

Then I saw that his whole frame was shak- 
ing as of palsy. This great, strong man had 
already overtaxed himself at hard work, and 
had broken his nerves, so that under any sort 
of undue excitement, as soon as the tension 
of it was over, he found himself unable to con- 
trol himself. This thing in my father was not 
strange to me, but it was out of all precedent 
that a falling limb should produce it ; so I said : 

“Are you afraid out here, father?” 

“No, I am not afraid; but never mind now, 
my son.” 

I said no more ; but here was a new experi- 
ence. Father’s heart was shut down from me. 
As I drove slowly home, I said to myself, What 
awful thing is this that he will not explain to 
me? I was hurt that I was shut out from his 
confidence. My thoughts about the matter be- 
came unbearable. As we passed the house 
toward the barn-plot, I made excuse to run in to 
get relief somehow from my feelings. I told 
mother the happening, and I saw in a moment 
she knew more than I did — that she understood 
the matter. Her reticence only put me in 
greater distress. She went to the barn-plot 
with me, and helped me to take the chocks 


Jim Handy, the Villain. 79 

from under the spike to let the log down, and 
she said : 

“You are not dead yet, are you, Reuben?” 

“ No, but I thought my time had come. I 
thought I saw old Jim turn his gun on me from 
under a pawpaw-bush ; but it was only a dead 
limb that fell across a black stump.” 

“ Would it not be better to have some one 
else haul the rest of the timber from that 
wood?” 

“No, no! I’ll go ahead and attend to my 
business, and let the consequences take care of 
themselves.” 

“ Well, I think, anyhow, you will have to tell 
your boy, here, more than he knows, and why 
you carry your gun to work these days. He is 
worked up about it.” 

“Well, come along, Rodney; we will g^t 
another stick of timber, and I will tell you.” 

So he did, and it was a great relief to me. 
But from that hour there were two pairs of eyes 
on guard for the bushwhacking old scoundrel. 

For ten years after this, old Jim ranged up 
and down the country. He was always to me 
the personification of villainy. The sight of 
him was the picture of all that is despicable in 
the human character. As the years went by, 
my fears of his executing his purpose grew less. 


8o 


IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 


After a time, Jim became too poor and trifling 
to own efficient firearms. So, also, as time 
passed, it became more and more doubtful if 
he had energy enough to originate a plot of 
shrewdness to carry out his threat. I have met 
him on the road a hundred times. I suppose 
he never knew me, and I never spoke to him. 
Father would speak, and sometimes exchange a 
word. Assuming that we never heard of his 
threats, Jim would affect friendliness in a cring- 
ing attitude, and call at the back door for some- 
thing to eat. Mother would feed him for the 
sake of peace. She had a woman’s wit, which 
in this case, as in most others, was doubtless of 
more value than man’s indifference and courage. 
Mother was wise when she declared that things 
were not equal when her husband’s life was 
thrown into the unequal chance with such a 
man as this. Mother was not given to feminine 
weaknesses, but she felt that it would be a dis- 
grace if father should ever have to take old Jim’s 
life in self-defense. But inasmuch as the prob- 
ability was that he would never have a chance 
to defend himself, she used a woman’s art to 
drive from Jim’s mind his belligerent and mur- 
derous purpose. Father objected to this policy ; 
but his objection did not change it. It was a 
case in which a woman’s insight had in it the 


Jim Handy, the Vieeain. 


8i 


greater reason. It will never be known, of 
course ; but the probabilities are that mother 
kept Jim from killing father. 

This affair, which I believe father never in- 
tended me to know, and which I never would 
have known had it not been for the incident in 
the timber, affected me so intensely that I came 
to feel myself personally identified with it. 
The matter possessed me so thoroughly that the 
sight of old Jim brought abhorrence to my very 
soul. It grew on me, until it finally resolved 
itself into a kind of half-formed purpose to rid 
the world of old Jim. The argument went this 
way in my mind : Old Jim is of no account. 
The world would be better off without him. 
All his relatives wish he were dead, for then 
they would no longer have him to feed and 
harbor. They tolerate him now, only because 
they are half afraid of him. If he should kill 
father, I will always wish I had taken the drop on 
him. Everybody believes he killed Uncle Wel- 
born. He is a murderer, and ought to die. I am 
a mild-mannered chap, and no one will suspect 
me. I put this down just as it was. You say 
there was murder in my heart. So there was. I 
did not count the cost. I was dallying with the 
ethical principle of the Irishman who said: “It 
is wrong to chate, but I would rather chate than 
6 


82 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


be chated.” I only say the feeling possessed 
me, and it culminated in a fearful temptation. 
It came to me at a time in life and under con- 
ditions which left me with absolutely no power 
to throw it off. I would like to have the reader 
remember that I was convinced beyond all doubt 
that this man was not crazy — that he was a 
very demon incarnate — and that he hoped to 
escape punishment for killing father under the 
lunacy dodge. His first success emboldened 
him for the second. Father was careless, and 
went without protection. He was so absorbed 
in his business that there would have been 
little difficulty in any one taking his life clan- 
destinely. 

One afternoon in the latter part of May, the 
summer I was twelve years old, I had finished 
plowing the ridge field, had put the horse in 
the stable, had taken the long rifle, and had 
gone into the west woods to hunt squirrels. 
This was a famous old gun we kept specially 
for small game. It run two hundred bullets to 
the pound. With thick patching, we could use 
buckshot in it. It looked more like the firearm 
of an Arab than anything else. It was known 
to have a fearful projectile force, and when 
loaded rightly, it would put the bullet where 
the bead was drawn without ’variation. When 


Jim Handy, the Viddain. 83 

the hunter fired this trusty old weapon and got 
no game, it was his own fault. I had come to 
great skill with this gun. I was not strong 
enough to hold it out off-hand, but could throw 
the long stock under my right arm, catch my 
left elbow on my left hip, bend over to get in 
line with the sights, and kill game on the 
ground. From the trees I had but little diffi- 
culty in getting a rest on a limb or by the side 
of a tree. It was a point of pride with me not 
to cut the body of the squirrel with the bullet. 
The size of a squirrel’s head was range enough 
anywhere. I sauntered through the woods this 
afternoon, given over largely to random thoughts 
and reflections, killing a squirrel now and then, 
and taking a sort of quarter-day holiday — a 
respite I had not enjoyed since the busy work 
of the spring opened. I remembered seeing old 
Jim that morning, in a skulking sort of way 
(he always appeared to me to skulk), with a gun 
on his shoulder, come from the direction of the 
Balner den, as it was commonly known — a family 
of bad repute, where, we understood, Jim had 
been keeping himself for a month or more — and 
he went into the timber east of Hazelgreen. 
Father at noon had gone west to the hill farm 
on the breaks of the creek, and was to return 
about sundown. He must travel an unfre- 


84 Lifk on a Backwoods Farm. 

quented road nearly all the way ; and it was the 
road old Jim came out in the morning. If Jim 
returned that way, he would meet father coming 
home. Putting these things together brought 
unpleasant thoughts ; so much so, that I lost 
all zest in the hunt, and had pushed my head 
and shoulders up among the low branches of a 
scraggy jack-oak bush in the thicket, and laid 
the gun across the limbs to take a rest and re- 
main quietly in hiding until a squirrel should 
report himself somewhere near. I was in the 
thickest kind of underbrush in about forty 
yards of the road, and could see it plainly, 
having a view up and down half a quarter or 
more. I saw old Jim coming down the road 
with his gun on his shoulder, and with his hat 
off, carrying it in front of him. He had some- 
thing in his hat. “What shall I do now?” I 
said to myself. He will meet father in the 
darkest place of the wood-road coming home. 
Jim could have easily been a spy to his going 
west at noon. I could not shake off my anxiety 
at the thought that the two men would meet 
alone in the woods ; one of them armed, and 
with a grudge in his heart. The sure way for 
my father’s safety began to sway me. Through 
a slight opening in the trees I saw Jim plainly 
as he came down the roadway, and seated him- 


Jim Handy, the Vieeain. 85 

self on an old log right opposite me by the 
roadside. I knew that he had been down to the 
house, and that mother had given him food. 
Through a break in the leaves not more than a 
foot square I had a full view, and was so situated 
that he could not possibly see me, unless, by 
noise or movement, his eye should be attracted. 
He took a part of a loaf of bread from his hat, 
and begun to crunch it. It was the part of a 
fine loaf we had left for dinner. That was 
plainly mother’s bread. It was to my mind a 
woman’s feeble effort to make peace with a 
villain. That huge man sat there, with his hat 
off, straight and still as a statue, except the 
working of his jaws and the going and coming 
of his hand, feeding himself. The sun was 
shining in his face. I saw his features as I 
never saw them before. Stalwart form, high 
forehead, uncombed hair reaching down to his 
shoulders, and whiskers as shaggy as a bush- 
man. Things dark and devilish were in that 
face. Mother’s gift of food was to me a humilia- 
tion. Uncle Welborn had fed that man for years, 
and then had been killed by him. I thought 
of my father’s peaceful and laborious and pros- 
perous life. And there before me was the object 
of all the hate I had ever known. Conse- 
quences ! What are they but the forces that 


S6 IyiEE on a Backwoods Farm. 

move me ! I pushed my rifle up over the limb of 
that jack-oak — cocked it, with the triggers set — 
and drew a perfect bead on old Jim’s forehead 
just three-quarters of an inch above his left eye- 
brow, and held it there, and rubbed my finger 
up and down the hair trigger of the rifle! I 
raised my head from the gun, and watched him 
for a while ; then drew another bead, and rubbed 
the trigger! Three separate times I did that 
thing. I did not kill old Jim because God 
drove me away from an awful desire. I wanted 
to touch the trigger — God forgive me ! Did 
Jim’s life hang in a balance? Did mine? 
Did the destiny of my soul hang on the fact 
of my rubbing that trigger without firing? In 
those moments the chatter of a squirrel in the 
branches would have touched my nerves and 
killed Jim. How calmly a mortal at times will 
walk out on the edges of eternal woe ! Glad in- 
deed I am that I did not kill that desperate 
man. It would have wrecked my life. 

As I walked away I was as conscious of the 
presence of an unseen and superior Power as I 
am conscious that I am writing these pages. I 
make a deliberate testimony that God stayed 
my murderous intent, and that he was angry 
with me. In the desire of my heart I had vexed 
him. This is all I can say about it — only that 



n 


“ I WANTED TO KILL OLD JIM 





















# 



































































- 






































































































\ 















Jim Handy, the Viddain. 87 

the incident made its ineffaceable marks on me, 
the meaning of which I am not yet able to 
understand. Out of the conditions of such 
strife it is possible that there have come values 
in the chastening of my spirit, and in the 
sobering of my thought toward a better com- 
panionship with the great God. That afternoon 
I knew there was a God, and I believed in him 
to the degree that I was angry with him because 
he kept me from killing old Jim. God had 
actually driven me away from my purpose, but 
I harbored the feeling and intent of murder. I 
regretted the loss of the opportunity, and vowed 
I would never lose another. It was an intense, 
a burning, an all-consuming passion in me, all 
that afternoon, from which I found no relief till 
father came riding in at the gate shortly after 
sunset. 

I had such a sleepless night that the family be- 
came anxious about me. The feeling of murder 
is an awful thing. Keep it out! Keep it out! 
It takes so much to call the spirit from under its 
deadening blast, so much to enthrone again the 
sweeter fellowships of life. It is well to know 
life, but it is also just as well not to have certain 
kinds of experiences. 


CHAPTER ¥11. 


REUBEN BLANNERHASSETT. 

“ My father fed his flocks, a frugal swain, 

Whose constant care was to increase his store, 
And keep his only son, myself, at home.” 


—John Home. 


E are all civilized now. We have the 



V V pride of culture. We want it understood 
we are up with the times. But I shall make 
the contention that the remains of a savage life 
are in us. The hunt and the chase, by hered- 
ity, has its fascinations. We revel in the tales 
of huntsmen. Eove for the chase and for hunt- 
ing is a relic of the wild life of our barbarous 
forefathers. Civilized as we are, we have our fine 
hunting-dogs and our breech-loaders. We are 
more splendidly equipped than the old hunters 
were. What we lack in game, we make up in 
powder and shot. We have to invent many ex- 


Reuben Beannerhassett. 89 

pedients to make hunting justifiable at all now. 
One modern hunter puts it in this way: “The 
exercise is worth the time, and the noise is 
worth the ammunition ; and if there be any game, 
it is clear profit.” The less the game, the greater 
the equipment for the business. There is plenty 
of hunting, but nothing to hunt ; more guns 
than ever, more fishing tackle ; and no game in 
the woods, no fish in the streams. These are 
degenerate days. There are three or four hunt- 
ers to every partridge in the hedge. There are 
a half-dozen boys (not counting the darkies) to 
every rabbit in the grass. I saw two colored 
men, the other day, send four loads of shot after 
one poor little rabbit. O for the good old days 
before shot-guns were invented — when marks- 
men were not so unworthy as to resort to un- 
fair means to capture the innocents of the for- 
est! To draw a bead for the placing of a single 
bullet — that is fair. Let a rabbit jump up and 
run off thirty or sixty yards, stop to see if 
you are coming, push his ears up over the grass 
to listen; then if you can bead him off-hand and 
get him, he is rightly your meat ; if not, you 
could see him another day — no more that day. 
Wild game, sir, had a fair chance in the olden 
time. No violation of conscience in taking it. 
You measured your powder from the ox-horn 


go Life on a Backwoods Farm:. 

into the rooster-spur charger, you poured it into 
your gun ; then you took your tallowed patching 
from your left pants pocket ; then you took a 
bullet from your deerskin shot-pouch; then you 
opened your old frogsticker, cut the patching 
from around the bullet; then you pulled your 
ramrod through the brass thimbles and pushed 
the bullet down, gave it three raps to bounce 
the ramrod out; then you primed the tube with 
more powder, and picked it in with a brass pin ; 
then you put on the percussion-cap, and by that 
time, if the game was not a mile away, it ought 
to be shot dead on the spot. 

I am of the opinion that people in an early 
day talked more than they do now; that is, in 
what was to them a profitable way. The themes 
were not of science or philosophy or art or 
the latest cablegram from across the sea, but of 
things within the sweep of their intellectual hori- 
zon. The family life now is silenced ’greatly 
by newspapers and books. Each blessed mem- 
ber gets off in a corner, and holds fellowship 
with strangers. The art of talking may yet be 
lost, or it may be taught as one of the classics. 

The great log-fire in our cabin home invited 
to enjoyment. The day’s work over, the supper 
finished, hickory wood-fire blazing brightly, and 


Reuben Beannerh assett. gi 

the family in a semicircle around it, moving 
back slowly as the coals get hotter, a neighbor 
or two in to spend the evening, or a traveler 
stopped over night, — this was the time for many 
a marvelous recital. Tales, legends, Indian sto- 
ries, pioneer struggles, hunter’s exploits, — with 
these the moments flew till bedtime. These 
fireside talks frequently produced scenes of dra- 
matic eloquence, great as was ever known in 
ancient academic shades. No greater power 
was ever given an orator than was seen in the 
portrayals of these early-time folks. They were 
nature’s dramatists. So unaffected they were, 
so unconsciously forceful, they were able to put 
a thing in its best form. They never thought 
of these fireside scenes as occasions of eloquent 
expressions; but such they were. Beside them, 
the modern looking-glass elocutionist would be 
laughed to scorn. I have seen and know much 
of the histrionic art, but I have never seen some 
of the recitals of the fireside of my cabin home 
excelled. The material dramatized was not art 
or science or history, but pioneer hardship, and 
adventure with wild animals, of fighting with In- 
dians, of rude sports, of love, of jealousy, and 
domestic tragedy. Our fireside was a stage. 
Father and mother, with the neighbors and 
strangers, were the actors. I was the small 


92 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

boy in the corner cracking hazel-nuts, and 
watching the tragedy of life, which was real 
fifty years before I was born, recited on that 
stage. A boy in the backwoods, with healthy, 
sensible people around him, has exceptional op- 
portunities. A child reared in the hotbeds of 
aristocracy and wealth is to be pitied. 

I will give you several of these stories in 
substance. As I heard them they can not be 
put into print. The types are dead things. 
The tales which I have to relate shall begin 
with the next chapter. 

I lacked the poetry of orphanage. My 
life came under the matter-of-fact conditions 
of having all the benefits of a good father and 
mother. My father, for his day, was a remark- 
able spirit. He would have been a significant 
force in any day. He would have been among 
the chief of citizens and financiers if his lot had 
been cast in a great city. He was Scotch through 
and through. He was a physical giant. These 
were the days when personal pride centered in 
muscular strength. It was pride of muscle in- 
stead of pride of brains. The best man phys- 
ically iu the neighborhood was always a leader 
and a ruler. Men in the early time were very 
much like the leaders of the wild herds. The 
leader was always a strong, courageous fellow, 


Reuben Buannerhassett. 


93 


who had fought his way to the front through a 
hundred battles without a single defeat. 

In mental temperament my father was a man 
of action, and of few words. He was in no 
sense a theorist. His education was so limited 
that he could not cipher in long division, but he 
could make the most abstruse mathematical cal- 
culations without knowing how he did it — that 
is, without being able to tell how. All his plans 
resolved themselves into action. I never knew 
him to express a purpose that he was not in the 
act of executing. When once committed to an 
enterprise in business, he was never known 
to give it up till completed. Difficulties only 
nerved him. His business plans were to him 
infallible. He believed in them so thoroughly 
that every one of them got a fair trial, and al- 
most invariably led him to success. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


A BLACK WOLF. 


“My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here; 
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.” 


— Burns. 


“O, what delight can a mortal lack, 

When he once is firm on his horse’s back, 

With his stirrups short, and his swaffle strong, 
And the blast of the horn for his morning song?” 


— Cornwauu. 


N aged Indian sits around the camp-fire, 



and regales the tribe with the deeds of his 
own heroism. He exalts his own life. He tells 
the same tale over for the hundredth time, and 
it never loses in the recital. In this way many 
an ordinary incident in Indian life has grown 
into a heroic deed of daring. 

White people of the early day were given to 
this sort of narrative, yet perhaps not so much to 
the Indian weakness of magnifying. But in mat- 


94 


A Black Wolf. 


95 


ters of personal adventure, I have heard the same 
thing over and over again. The first time you 
hear a story, it has the interest of novelty ; and 
each time you hear it afterward, it lacks nov- 
elty, but it takes hold of you more and more. 
Its meaning grows into you. My child-rnind 
was so filled with pioneer exploits, the experi- 
ences of people who lived near us, that I am 
sure I shall never be able to get away from 
them. The persons themselves, through my 
life, have been associated with the contributions 
they made to my stock of hunter’s tales. 

Reuben Blannerhassett, my father, first set- 
tled in Indiana, on the prairies south of Lafay- 
ette. There he kept two grey-hound dogs for 
the wolf hunt. He also kept, for the chase, a 
full-blood Bertran horse, famous for speed and 
endurance. The peculiar quality of this family 
of horses was what was known then as bottom. 
In his trials of speed with other horses, Bertran 
had become famous for his staying qualities. 
For these reasons he was king of the chase among 
horses in the locality. He was kept for that and 
nothing else. Having a rider with judgment, 
he could veritably run all day. This magnifi- 
cent horse loved the chase, and always chafed 
like a chained lion till he was set free on the 
prairie after wolf or deer. He could overtake 


96 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

the fleetest buck that ever ran over the ground, 
and allow his rider to shoot at short range. 
Many and familiar were the times when, with 
only two or three hours to spare, the young 
lover of the chase would loose Bertran from the 
stall, throw over the saddle, fasten it with a 
surcingle of platted buckskin thongs, put into 
his mouth the smooth bit of a bridle ornamented 
with trophies of the chase — four wolf-tails — one 
at each side of the browband, and one at each 
ring in the bit. Whenever that bridle went on, 
the fire would come into Bertran’s eye, and he 
was so restless then, that to mount him was to 
to leap with him into the air. Bertran wanted his 
keeper to get into the saddle, but he wanted him 
to understand that, after he was in it, he would 
need neither spur nor lash. The first note of 
the horn that always hung at the saddle would 
bring the great dogs to the scene, and they 
moved out into the hunting-grounds at half 
speed. Any day a wolf could be started in an 
hour or such matter, and then, with the speed 
of the wind, they would run a mile or two, and 
the wolf would turn to bay. Then a rugged 
battle of a minute, and all was over. The 
horse’s head would drop to pick at the tufts of 
grass in reach of him ; he would scent in a quiet 
way the carcass of the animal just taken, take a 


A Black Wolf. 


97 


long breath, and then turn with his rider and 
walk homeward as quietly as a family roadster. 

One morning Bertran was saddled for a half- 
day’s wolf-hunt. The hunter was soon in the 
saddle, and a turn on the horn brought the dogs 
bounding from the kennel. This day, horse and 
dogs and rider were in unusual spirits. A half- 
hour of brisk movement brought them into the 
skirts of the famous Wea Plains. As luck would 
have it, the dogs started, in the edge of the timber, 
a black timber-wolf — or as ill-luck would have 
it — for the dogs had flushed this old fellow two or 
three times, and each time he would take down 
the ravine and stay in the timber. In these cases 
the dogs would be called off. A grey-hound, as 
you know, runs by sight, and can not run in 
the timber. He laps himself around trees and 
bushes to his own destruction. His speed is 
such, with his length, that he is not able to 
make the quick turns necessary to miss the 
trees. A black wolf is about a third larger 
than a prarie-wolf, and he can run about a third 
faster than any wild animal known. It was be- 
lieved by hunters that a grey-hound could not 
catch him. 

This particular hunter, with his special 
equipment, was particularly ambitious ; and each 
time this black wolf was started, he was wish- 
7 


98 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

ing that he might move out into open ground, 
and give the dogs a chance. But the rider was 
used to saying to his dogs in this case : “ Come 
here, Heakle; come back, Bruno; he is afraid 
to cut out over the prairie.” 

This morning the hunter was reining his 
horse as near the bushes as possible, with a 
faint hope that if the black wolf started from 
this region of his hiding, he might be induced 
to cross the open country. Of the two dogs, 
Bruno was the elder; in fact, he had seen his 
best days. He was about twenty-six inches 
high, pale-bluish ash in color, with a fine scent, 
and always followed his prey with such speed 
as to have never known defeat. He was a dog 
of remarkable courage and sagacity. He had 

i 

about him a wolfish aspect, so much so that, had 
it not been for his size, he would have been 
marked with the disgrace of having a few drops 
of wolf-blood in him. He was a pure grey- 
hound. So was Heakle, a fine young dog, who 
did not really know his own speed. A prairie- 
wolf did not tax hitn. He could play in front 
of a deer at pleasure, and jump from side to 
side. He knew Bertran could outrun him, and 
that is all. As they expected, the black wolf 
started from the grass directly ; but, to their as- 
tonishment, and in a daring way, he started out 


A Black Wolf. 


99 


over the prairie, as if intending to cross it to the 
timber, which was out of sight on the other 
side. The horse first caught sight of the wolf, 
and went into the air in a moment. The hunter 
gave a yell that brought both dogs with a great 
leap into the air to sight the game. Bruno got 
the direction; but the young dog was behind a 
covert of bushes, and lost time by running in the 
wrong direction till he got the course of the 
chase by the yells. 

Bruno was in the lead ; the horse and rider 
next, as if to say, “ Now, you black varmint, if 
you go out over there, you must go in a hurry.” 
Before the young dog caught the direction, 
they were in the short grass of the open prairie 
a hundred yards away ; but with every leap in 
this time, the hunter’s yell helped the old dog 
to cover his distance. This wolf had been used 
to having a spurt through the timber, then a 
rest; so, unwary of his danger, Bruno crept on 
him for the first half mile. Four rods between 
them. Horse and rider just behind. The young 
dog coming. Now begins the battle. Will this 
team fail to take the fastest game in the forest, 
and with a fair chance ? Horse and rider urge 
the old dog up to two rods, but not another inch. 
Everything is on its mettle now. The rider is 
lost in the wild excitement. Bruno is stirred to 


IOO 


I^ifk on a Backwoods Farm. 


his work as never before. He runs with all the 
canine expectation that had never known defeat 
in a fair chance, so it is his first experience in a 
halting game. The wolf bounds ahead. The 
old dog gains an inch now, and then loses it. 

The great horse is on fire. He scents the 
game, and every nerve is awake — every muscle 
at full play. His nostrils are dilated, the fine 
foam flying from his mouth and striking the 
hunter in the face ; his powerful lungs are in 
complete action, and, with a heavy man on him, 
he leaps like a hart, and has to be held in. On 
they go. The old dog is urged to heroic work. 
“ Now, now, Bruno, if you ever did go, take 
him now — take him now — now — now!” The 
wolf has gained a length, and the hunter loses 
hope. He turns in his saddle : “ Heakle, Heakle ! 
Come on, come on ! Bruno can’t get him !” 

The young dog is coming; but it is a fearful 
distance to make up, when blue lightning leads 
the chase. “Go now, Bruno; go now! If you 
were two years younger you would get him! 
You are twenty feet away now, Bruno. Five 
more feet, and he flinches. Ho! Bertran, ho! 
Ho ! steady now — go, old boy — go — go !” Dog 
and wolf are now to their limits. There is not 
a break or falter in the fearful race of life and 
death. They are all running without a sound, 



















' 

- 










































A NINE-MILE CHASE 





A Black Wolf. 


ioi 


except the hunter’s urging voice — running as 
smoothly as the rocking of the billows on the 
ocean as the storm goes to sleep. The timber 
comes into view on the other side. “ Heakle, 
Heakle ! Here you come ! Hurrah ! Now, 
Bruno ! Do n’t let Heakle get him ! Do n’t let 
Heakle get him, old boy! Make him miss his 
jump, Bruno !” There ! The wolf’s tail drops, 
his head goes up, he whirls around; the old dog 
plunges at him and goes by, receiving a gash in 
his shoulder. Young dog and wolf clinch. 
Horse and rider go by, turn round. Heakle is 
in battle with the wolf. The hunter dismounts, 
and quickly unbuckles from the saddle the strap 
and heavy steel stirrup, ready to help with a 
stroke from it, if needed. 

There is no need. The young dog already 
has his last hold, and is making up for being 
behind in the race. 

The dismounted hunter is now holding the 
wounded dog from returning to the encounter ; 
has pulled him down in the grass, and as he 
lays there panting, he kisses him again and 
again, saying, over and over : “ You got him, 
Bruno ; you got him, you got him !” 

The victorious young huntsman rises to take 
his bearings, and finds that he is nine miles from 
the starting-point of the chase. The distance 


102 


L,ifk on a Backwoods Farm. 


startles him. He looks at his horse. There he 
stands— a pitiful sight, trembling in every limb. 
Bruno staggers to his feet. The hunter hur- 
riedly scalps the wolf, leaving the carcass lying 
in the grass, and takes the reins and leads the 
horse home, followed by the dogs. 

Old Bruno never caught another wolf. His 
days for the chase were then over. He never 
could rally himself to keep in sight of a wolf 
again. The wound in his shoulder made him 
permanently lame. Bertran had at last been 
outwinded. He never entered the chase again. 
He hacked about the farm, and had kindly care; 
but to his last days, if the hounds would bellow 
on the trail in hearing, he would stamp in his 
stall, and sniff the air with as much spirit as 
in the day when his feet were as fleet as the 
wind. 

The young pioneer and huntsman had his 
regrets over his horse and dog. But he would 
have put his own body to the same limits under 
the same excitement. It may be said that 
things like this are lacking in the nobler ele- 
ments of reason. But are they ? Is not this in 
essence the heroic in life? Does the spirit of 
heroism and conquest in action always have to 
give a moral account of itself? May not that 
chase be a picture of the life we are living? Do 


A Bi<ack WoivF. 


103 

those who are never moved by such a spirit 
ever get anywhere, or accomplish anything? 
Those who never give themselves over to the 
soul’s impulses, wrought into action by whatever 
is able to call out its energies, never reach 
achievments worth naming. They are of those 
left behind in the race of life. They are the 
stay-at-homes. They are the pussies-in-the- 
corner — sleek and fine and well fed, but without 
energy enough to catch a mouse. 

Life is a chase. The game is up. Shall we 
capture or lose it ? What do you say ? The 
turns life will take, and the amount of energy 
suddenly to be summoned, can not be estimated 
long beforehand. A faint heart will not win in 
the chase. A purpose to win which is so virile 
at times as to make no estimate of distance or 
cost is the purpose that has heroism in it, and 
the swing of conquest. Life is this sort of a 
struggle. Immortality is a struggle. Have you 
the stuff in you to get immortality? If you 
have, you shall have it. Yonder is your goal. 
Do you see it? Get there! Get there, if it 
costs you effort, and time, and dollars, and 
friends ; if you have to burn the candle at both 
ends — if you die. 

But suppose the goal, good enough in it- 
self, is not worth all of this. It is so that the 


104 


IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 


object in life may not be equal to the energy 
and sacrifice made to achieve it. A laconic 
preacher once described a great genius in liter- 
ature, who had thrown the force of his im- 
mense talents in a direction in which the 
preacher thought there was nothing possibly 
commensurate with the great ability devoted 
to it, as “a spiritual giant, sitting on the 
tombstone of hope, cracking hazelnuts with 
a sledge-hammer.” There are cases in which 
this is true, and we are not now wholly to 
defend this hunter. But how are we always 
to know that the end will justify the means? 
How are we always to know when it will 
justify them? Are we always to stand around 
till the infallible certainties of prophecy de- 
clare we may take our hands from our pock- 
ets? In these cases, where the end does not 
justify the means — in the times when we have 
run a mile to crush a butterfly in our hands — is 
there any compensation? To be lost in the 
impulse of an enterprise — that is great, unless 
the enterprise be evil. That wolf was not worth 
a good dog and a good horse , but THE CHASE 
WAS. 

That which is objectively gained in life may 
not be worth what it costs ; but the effort made 
to get it has its value. Have I paid for things 


A Black Wolf. 


105 

more than they are worth, and is my life therein 
the loser? If by any overplus of payment the 
struggle of my life has been intensified in any 
degree, the thews of my soul by that struggle 
have been drawn out. My own effort has put 
its own sunshine into me, and in the final 
product I have been the gainer. Heaven! — 
where is it? I do not know, but I know the 
race I make for it will put into my spirit its 
substance by the time I have reached it. 



CHAPTER IX. 

A PANTHER’S SKIN. 

“A fireplace filled the room’s one side 
With half a cord o’ wood in — 

There war n’t no stoves (till comfort died) 

To bake ye to a puddin’.” 

— IvOWERI,. 

W HAT wild freedom and naturalness in the 
relations of men and women in the earlier 
days ! I shall be pardoned if I express the 
opinion that men and women were better mated 
then than now. False ideas of social caste 
were not in the way then as now. “Sassiety” 
is frequently scandalized now over some blue- 
blood of a boy or girl marrying below rank. 
Frequently these escapades are mistakes, but 
they are more significantly declarations of revolt 
against the conventionalism of society. The 

barriers of station and rank in life may work 
106 


A Panther’s Skin. 107 

desirable things for certain families and certain 
classes ; but they are not the better conditions 
for the race. The relations of the sexes, under 
the moral standard, should be controlled more 
by nature than by the cobwebs of owlish phi- 
losophy and iron-bound social custom. It is 
now and then the thing for the scion of titled 
nobility to defy the courts and his regal grand- 
mothers, and go out and marry some buxom 
country lass, and put a strain of fresh, clean 
blood into the well-pedigreed and well-run-out 
family line. 

It is often a benediction to the tenderly-cared- 
for house-flower of a daughter, reared in wealth, 
when she shocks her set by declaring in favor of 
some rough-handed country greeny — not only on 
the ground that there is sure to be outcome in 
him, but for the ill-apprehended reason that the 
attrition of her life against the sober, practical 
sense of his, will give to her the added feature 
of her experience and training so necessary to 
the full rounding of her womanhood. 

Is it not so that a man of spirit is nearly 
always popular with the ladies? A woman, as a 
rule, admires a courageous and manly man. So 
a woman is attractive to a man in the degree 
that she is womanly. There are mannish wo- 
men, and womanish men; but they are the 


108 IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 

exceptions. They are variations from type. 
There is that indescribable sum of qualities 
which constitutes our ideal of woman. It is 
the splendid feminine spirituelle we call woman. 
Tennyson says: 

“ For woman is not undeveloped man, 

But diverse. Could we make her as the man, 

Sweet love were slain. His dearest bond is this, 

Not like to like, but like in difference.” 

The man who never felt love in his heart for 
a pure woman is a stranger to one of the high- 
est emotions of the soul. Woman is the feeder 
of the fountain of love in man’s heart, by which 
he is made strong and good and great. No 
man is ever really strong until he falls down at 
the feet of the woman he loves. 

Fond as Reuben Blannerhassett was of the 
society of good women, he lived to be an old 
bachelor ; and, as would naturally follow, his 
social life was not devoid of an occasional esca- 
pade. What reasons these may have had for 
his living to be an old bachelor, I do not know. 
I only know that he did a smart thing for him- 
self when he did get married. There was 
always an immense spirit of raillery about him 
when he would volunteer to give mother air 
account of the times he had with many a fine 
girl before he ever knew her. She would sit 


A Panther’s Skin. 


109 


and look into the fire while he drew the pictures — 
and right largely on his imagination for much 
of the coloring, until he came to the right place — 
and she would silence him by wondering why 
he did not take some of them. 

Before the fireplace in our house on all 
special occasions, to answer for a rug, lay the 
tanned skin of an immensely large panther. 
Many an hour I have played on this rug, and 
stuck my fingers into the holes for the eyes. 
One night I found a hole in the head-piece 
above the eye. Mother knew that father had 
killed that panther when quite a young man, 
and that it pleased him to have it before him 
near the hearth. One night she started him 
by asking: 

“That hole in the head there, Reuben — is 
that the place where the bullet went in?” 

“Well, well, there is a hole there besides for 
the eyes. I had almost forgotten. I must tell 
you about that now, since your name is Louise 
Blannerhasset, and you are safe. That came 
about by going a-sparkin’. One night in the 
break of winter (and this was long before I 
knew you, my dear, so it will make no particular 
difference to you) I took my best girl to singing- 
school. We walked. The place was a mile the 
other side of her house. Her folks lived across 


I IO 


IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 


the hurricane, as we called it — a stretch of tim- 
ber a mile and a half wide, which had been fear- 
fully wrecked with a cyclone. There was no 
road through it, only a foot-path, to be trailed 
by those who knew it. It is not necessary to say 
to you that I was well acquainted with that 
path.” 

“Never mind about that; go on with your 
story,” said mother. 

“ One night I was over there in peach-titne. 
Her mother had filled the lower bureau-drawer 
with fine peaches; and, after the folks had retired, 
we went back to that drawer and opened it, but 
we did not take a peach.” 

“ Certainly, certainly, not one. I expect you 
to say, next, that peaches were always ripe when 
you went over there. Of course, I understand 
you now to say that in the latter part of winter 
these peaches were ripe — ” 

“ No, not that ; this was another time. One 
time I went over and stayed over night, and 
next morning I forgot to put my vest on with 
my coat, and had to return for the vest. I 
stayed over night with the folks in all bad 
weather; but I had to go in bad weather. An- 
other morning I could not get my boots on. I 
pulled till I saw stars. It was no use. I had 
to split them down in front.” 


A Panther’s Skin. 


i 1 1 


“You were certainly a blooming youth. I 
can partly see now how I happened to get you. 
But if you make it up as you go along, you will 
contradict yourself again. What about the pan- 
ther? There must have been some reality 
about that.” 

“Oyes; I forgot. A heavy rain had fallen 
while we were at the singing, and the road 
was full of water. There must have been twenty 
places between there and home, where I had to 
carry her over the water in the road. It was 
an awful job, I tell you. And she was no 
midget. She had weight as well as beauty. The 
last place was a long space of water. I came 
very near having to put her down in the middle 
of the pond to get a new hold ; but a smart box 
on my ear reminded me that chivalry without 
strength in a man was nothing, and I rallied 
myself to the heroic work of reaching the edge. 
My ear smarts a little yet. Is it not red?” 

“Slightly, yes. But why don’t you get to 
your panther story, some time or other?” 

“I was just coming to that. I took my girl 
home. We did not swing on the gate. There 
was none. We sat on the front fence a while, 
and she went in the house, and I started home 
across the hurricane. To say that I was in a 
pleasant state of mind is no exaggeration.” 


1 12 


Lifk on a Backwoods Farm. 


“ The dictionary has the word prolix in it — 
that’s yon, Reuben.” 

“Yes; but I want to enjoy that side of it as 
long as posssible ; for the other is not so pleasant. 
The visit had a tragic close. This hurricane 
was a wild, desolate region. The Indians had 
not camped here for several years; but it 
abounded in wild game — such as frequent the 
upland regions. As I said to you, I was occu- 
pied with pleasant thoughts, until my attention 
was directed to a slight noise, off quite a distance. 
I was used to noises while passing through the 
woods, and, for a time, paid no attention to it. 
Presently there was a scratching in the leaves 
somewhat nearer. My first thought was that it 
was my dog come to me ; and, if so, he would 
present himself in a moment. I still paid but 
little attention. I saw directly that it was some 
wild animal. It was keeping pace with me about 
a hundred feet away in the bushes, and it would, 
now and then, throw the leaves behind it with 
great vigor. I was not exactly at ease ; for I saw 
it was directing its course by mine. I kept in the 
path without increasing or slackening my speed. 
I was unarmed, except an old barlow-knife in my 
pocket. I was apprised directly of the whole 
situation. A hideous scream transfixed me. It 
was not so loud, but it went through me like a 


A Panther’s Skin. 


113 

knife. I pushed down my hat, and went on. 
There was nothing else to do. It was folly to 
run. It was equal folly to provoke attack. 
Must I be torn to pieces by this panther? It 
was evidently hungry. Another scream. Hor- 
rors ! what a sound ! Nature gave the panther 
its scream to unnerve its prey. What a strange 
mesmeric power this animal life about us has ! 
I was so helpless in the face of the danger, and 
with nothing that I could do but walk along the 
path, and wait developments, that I actually fell 
to thinking of the fearful power those screams 
were having on me in spite of my will. 

“ I had known something of the mesmeric 
force of animal life since my childhood. I had 
been entertained and amused by it, but I had 
never experienced anything like this. I have 
watched the performances of a snake charming 
the mother bird — so intently once, that I came 
under the spell of it. I remember another time 
having climbed a rafter of the barn to examine a 
bat ; and when I poked him with a straw, he ut- 
tered such a horrid and galvanic little squeak, 
that my nerves let go my muscles, and I brought 
up twenty feet below in the hay. More than 
once have my nerves been unstrung by the 
piercing cry of the rabbit, and in the moment 

of the cry it has escaped from my hands. The 

8 


1 14 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

dog lias this mesmerism in his growl. The 
lion has it in his roar. Nearly all birds have it 
in a limited degree in the distressing notes they 
give when captured. 

“ But, alas! these were all playthings to the 
terrorizing awfulness of this noise. I know I 
am not lacking in physical courage. And I was 
not born in the woods to be scared by an owl. 
But in spite of my will toward self-possession, I 
felt that these two screams had taken half my 
strength from me, and I fully expected to have 
to fight that animal naked-handed, and in that 
condition. The thing ran ahead of me fifty 
yards or more, and went up a scrubby oak near 
the path. I knew the tree. I preferred to 
meet its spring from the ground, and I left the 
path for a point in it farther down, and about 
fifty yards beyond. After reaching the path 
again, I walked on only to hear the panther 
scratching the bark of the oak-tree coming 
down. I knew then he was still in pursuit. I 
walked slowly, and with firmness. To show 
either fight or fear meant to bring on the battle. 
Suddenly all fear left me, as I made up my 
mind to take whatever might come. I remem- 
bered God’s promise that man should have do- 
minion over the beasts of the field. I heard no 
sound for a few minutes, but I knew he was 


A Panther’s Skin. 


115 

coming down that path like a sleuth-hound after 
me. I walked on until I knew that he was 
near; and I turned round and there he was, not 
three rods away. The issue had come, and I 
rushed at him with an awful ‘Down, down, you 
cowardly beast !’ and he slunk away into the 
brush. I turned and walked on. He followed 
me, and kept even along the side of the path, 
throwing the leaves, and appearing at irreg- 
ular distances in the brush. I finally came 
to a smooth wagon-road, less than a quarter 
from the house. I knew every foot of the 
ground, and I decided to run. And I did not 
stand on the going. Under headway, and feel- 
ing pretty safe, suddenly my dog went past 
me like a shot, and did not return till morning. 
I went into the house, and slammed the door so 
hard that it waked all the sleepers. 

“Once inside, I had the comfortable home 
feeling. Verily, there is no place like home. I 
was so exhausted with my nervous strain that I 
went to sleep on touching the bed; but I was 
up next morning by daylight. I cleaned my 
rifle with tow and hot water, molded fifty new 
bullets, loaded the gun finely, and made for the 
hurricane to hunt for that panther. The old dog, 
who seemed to have had an experience, went 
along. For that day I followed the dog, hop- 


1 1 6 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

ing he would give me some clue to the place 
of the beast. I wanted sight of that animal 
for a minute or two in open daylight. I spent 
from daylight till dark of the next five days 
hunting for that panther. I traversed, I thought, 
every possible place of hiding for twenty miles 
around. I was encouraged by news of his 
screams at night. I heard none of these, 
for I was not out when I could not see the 
bead of my gun. One morning I was encour- 
aged in finding the carcass of a pig he had evi- 
dently devoured the night before. By Friday 
I became weary of the fruitless search, as it 
seemed to be. My tramps through the woods 
were without variety; for so intense was my de- 
sire to get sight of this animal, that I refused 
shots at the finest game, for fear the report of 
my rifle might drive him farther away. 

“It was about the middle of the afternoon 
on Saturday that I turned my steps homeward 
out of the big bend of the Wabash bottom, 
intending to give up the hunt. I had not 
gone more than twenty steps when the dog 
struck a trail that excited him. He would 
only follow it in a walk, and with a sniff and 
a growl very unusual in him. There was 
no wagging of the tail, and he evidently did 
not enjoy it. Whatever this is, I said, it is big 


A Panther's Skin. 


ii 7 

game. I followed him slowly down into the 
black land, across about two hundred yards of 
overflow bottom of the heaviest sycamore and 
swamp-elm. We passed through a thick covert 
into a clump of low-limbed black- walnut trees. 
The dog suddenly stopped, and began a low 
growl, which ended in a whine. His actions 
distressed me; for he seemed to know where the 
game was, and was unwilling to give me any 
clue to it. He would follow the trail out from 
me fifty feet or more, then quit it and return to 
me with his hair standing straight all around. 
He refused to go forward when I urged him. My 
blood was up, for I knew I was in for something 
more than usual. I cocked the gun. I kept the 
dog in front of me till I saw from his eye the 
game was not on the ground. There it was, in the 
huge fork of a walnut-tree not twenty feet from 
the ground, only the head and shoulders visible. 
I felt for my hunter’s knife. It was in its place. 
I drew a bead on his left eye, but as I touched 
the trigger he moved his head slightly, and I 
was not sure of my shot. He threw his head 
up — gave two or three savage snaps of the 
jaws, then reeled over the other side of the limb, 
and was out of sight a moment; then he came 
crashing to the ground. I began loading, but 
there was no movement. I finished loading, 


1 1 8 Life on a Backwoods Farm:. 

and approached the place where the animal lay ; 
and I was a little too exultant to be cautious. 
The body had stopped quivering, and I could 
detect no breathing. Certainly that bullet had 
gone through his brain, and the time of my 
reward had come. I was in ten feet of where 
he lay, and saw the movement of his eye as he 
caught sight of me ; and quick as thought he 
whirled on his belly and leaped into the air, 
and was upon me. I had no time to aim. I 
threw up the gun with my left hand and he 
caught the gun-barrel in his teeth ; and the 
gun-stock received the blow of his left claw ; 
but his right fore-claw came over my left 
shoulder, while one hip and the other thigh re- 
ceived his hind-feet, each talon lacerating my 
flesh. I put my knife into him in a moment, 
and he fell over dead. I found in a minute that 
I was fearfully wounded. The blood began to 
run down my back ; but how badly my flesh 
was torn there, I could not know. My shoulder- 
blade felt as if it had been lifted from my back. 
The blood spurted from both hip and thigh. 
It looked as if I must bleed to death. I put 
my hands on hip and thigh to stop the bleed- 
ing. My shoulder wound soon stopped bleed- 
ing, and so did my hip; but the cut in the thigh 
had severed an artery, and I could not stop it, 


A Panther's Skin. 


r 19 


only as I held it with my hands. The nearest 
house I knew, in the direction of home, was 
two miles. I left the game and my gun in the 
woods, and undertook to make the distance. 

“Before dark I reached the cabin of John 
Hennesy. John did not know me at first, and 
he said : 

“ ‘Great God, man ! what is the matter? You 
are covered with blood.’ 

“ ‘ I got my panther, John, and maybe he has 
got me.’ 

‘“Why, Rube Blannerhasset! you are so 
bloody I did not know you. Come in. Here, 
wife, help this man. I knew you had been hunt- 
ing that varmint ever since he interfered with 
your sparkin’ business.* You were bound to have 
things out of the way of your crossing the 
hurricane. Did you miss your shot? Rather 
an unlikely thing for you.’ 

“‘I could only see his head, and he moved 
it just as I fired, and it turned out that I had 
to shoot him with my knife. That is how I got 
scratched. Go for the doctor, John, and let him 
fix these wounds, and then I will tell you where 
he is, with the gun.’ 

“John was off in a minute, and in two hours 
the doctor was there. The neighborhood was 
there, and they held a jubilee over the dead 


120 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


panther. During the time my wounds were 
healing I tanned that pelt with alum and wood- 
ashes. And you have made a floor rug of it. 
They say in New York that would be considered 
a luxury. A wild panther-skin rug on our floor 
is quite an amount of style for backwoodsers ; 
and we can only afford it because I went to see 
that girl — long before I ever knew you, who are 
now Louise Blannerhassett.” 

“It was an ill wind that blew a little good,” 
said my mother ; and the candle was blown out 
for the night. 



CHAPTER X. 

WITCHES. 

“ When the fire out-doors burns merrily, 

There the witches are, making tea.” 

— Whittier. 

T T is not very strange that in an early day 
1 many people should believe in witches. 
Their rude minds never had more than the 
touch of a half-civilized life. They were in no 
sense responsible for being ignorant of the re- 
flective values which education brings. It was 
only natural, therefore, and to be expected of 
them, that they should have some explanation 
of the occult and mysterious mental and physical 
forces which had their full play among these 
strong-minded and strong-bodied, but uncul- 
tured people. It was then as it is always — some 
one mind, coming to a conclusion and proclaim- 
ing it, makes converts, and gets itself on the 

121 


122 lyiFE on a Backwoods Farm:. 

forefront of attention ; and it holds the day, 
though born of superstition — itself a supersti- 
tion. It is frequently so that a whole commu- 
nity comes to believe the vagaries of a single 
mind. Shall we ever be free from these per- 
plexing moral and psychic forces that have such 
marvelous interplay between the life terrestrial 
and the life celestial ? Is it desirable to get rid 
of them, except in the sense of driving the do- 
minion of mystery before us as we advance in 
the knowledges? This is the only world, so far 
as we know, where the instincts of the animal 
are linked with the aspirations of a God. And 
it may be that this is the world in which God 
has linked his two codes — the physical and 
spiritual. We do not know but this is the pro- 
creating ground of the universe. But we do 
know that we are here in the edges of what we 
believe to be the spiritual world, and that we 
frequently lose our bearings and follow the igmis 
fatuus into the swamps. These mysterious 
laws, concerning the operation of which we yet 
know but little, were hung about with super- 
stitious notions then, in a greater way than now; 
and they produced a class of phenomena peculiar 
to the time. 

The spirit of investigation into the ground of 
things was not as keen then. The earlier years 


Witches. 


125 

of a nation’s life are of the poetical cast rather 
than the scientific. The poetical spirit person- 
ates all forces. The scientific spirit has no use 
for a personal pronoun. 

The explanations given certain facts, as these 
people knew them, were the best the mind could 
do for itself, lacking knowledge. The mysteries 
of life do not get rid of the facts of life ; and the 
physical laws with which we are acquainted do 
not explain all facts, or account for all facts, by 
any means. 

Of course I believed in witches with the 
other folks. My idea of a witch was a toothless 
old hag, visible and invisible at will, and pos- 
sessed with power to torment people with whom 
displeased. I never saw a witch ; but like others, 
I have suffered a hundred deaths in expectation 
of seeing one. Until I was quite a boy I sup- 
posed I had saved my life several times by run- 
ning from them. The witch stories I heard 
when I was a boy were grim-visaged affairs. 
There was a particularly peculiar character in 
the country, who was not so much a vagabond 
as possessed with a penchant for going from 
house to house, 'staying over night, and regaling 
the people with his talk. He thought himself 
a great conversationalist. He was not a bore, 
or a sponge, but a stayer over night. He did 


124 L,ife on a Backwoods Farm. 

not expect an invitation to stop with people. 
He would walk in, take off his hat, and, when 
the meal was ready, take his seat at the table. 
It never seemed to enter his mind that people 
might not want him, or that it could possibly 
be inconvenient to keep him. He was a glib 
talker. You had hardly time yourself to think 
whether you wanted him or not, he talked so 
incessantly. From the time he entered the 
door, till he was out of sight, he talked. Most 
people enjoyed him. His intelligence was above 
the average. He knew it, and presumed on it, 
and no doubt regarded himself somewhat in the 
light of a philanthropist. Into the monotonous 
life of many an early home he went, and fur- 
nished it a little variety from the humdrum of 
daily toil. He was a walking cyclopedia of 
country news. He answered the purpose of a 
local newspaper. He was like the interlude in 
a Church hymn. He gave you time to get your 
breath, and that in a realistic way ; because you 
could hardly get in a word edgeways. Mother’s 
opinion of him was, that he liked a change of 
victuals, and that, while he was not lazy — that is 
to say, lazy — he could stand a vast amount of 
rest. Timothy Copenhaver was this man’s 
name, and his forte was a witch story. He 
either believed in them or not, as suited the 


Witches. 


125 


occasion. He could spin them out of his own 
brain like webs from a spider. Whenever I 
knew he was to be with 11s over night, I man- 
aged to get to bed and asleep before he got 
started. In the times I failed in this, I fought 
witches all night in my sleep. Mother saw this, 
and managed to help me get to sleep. But I 
suffered greatly under this man’s witch stories. 
In memory of my own suffering, I want to enter 
here my protest against telling witch stories to 
children. The child-mind is too pliable ; it is 
too wholly unprotected, and is not able to detect 
the difference between the real and the mythical 
in human speech. It takes all these apprehen- 
sions as realities, and broods over them, and con- 
jures pictures more horrid, and adds to them, 
till the young life is a flood of fears. 

Now, I want to contradict my preaching, and 
tell a witch story; but its features will be of 
the milder sort, and I give it partly for the busi- 
ness there is in it, and as characteristic of the 
time. The spring I was seven years old, we 
sold our improved farm, with the intention of 
going farther west. Father made a trip of in- 
spection, and returned without finding a satis- 
factory location. Three miles south of us was 
a farm of two hundred and forty acres, of great 
natural richness and beauty, owned by one Tom 


126 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

Dorkey. Dorkey believed in witches. The 
witches had always had entirely too much to do 
with his affairs. For many years, off and on, 
he was bothered. His baulky horses were be- 
witched. That was his interpretation of it. The 
ordinary interpretation of a baulky horse, how- 
ever, is a baulky man. The witches would get 
into his cows, and make them give bloody milk. 
They would ride his hogs into the woods, and 
run them wild. The witches would spoil his 
wife’s soap. They would attack Dorkey per- 
sonally. They would put splinters into his 
eyes. He could never go to Manning’s grocery 
without being kept till late in the night, and 
then be put on his horse with his face to the 
rear. They would pull the corks out of his 
whisky-jugs and upset them — a most cruel and 
grievous offense this. They would take him 
out of his bed at night, and ride him over the 
country, barefooted and freezing. One night 
they hitched him to a gate-post, and went off 
and left him. Where he was he did not know. 
It was a strange and peculiar place. He thought 
he would mark that gate-post with his teeth, so 
that he might find it the next day. He arose 
next morning to find he had been trying the 
bed-post with his teeth. The witches kept get- 
ting worse with Dorkey, and he made up his 


Witches. 


127 


mind to move. He was looking around for a 
buyer when father met him. The trade was 
soon made, and a fair price was agreed upon. 
To clinch the trade, father paid him three hun- 
hundred dollars. This was before getting a 
deed. After the trade had been made a few 
days, the witches with Dorkey had been getting 
better, he said, and he was about to “ back out.” 
Things then were in such a shape that if he 
did, father would probably lose his three hun- 
dred dollars. I do not know precisely how that 
was, but one foundation for the fear was that 
Dorkey was tricky, as well as superstitious. So 
it came to pass, as the witches got better with 
Dorkey, they got worse with father. It was 
known that he took more interest in the witches 
in this case, than in all the tales he had ever 
heard Copenhaver spin. He wished no man any 
harm, but he would venture to wish that Dor- 
key would have another bad spell. He would 
lie awake at night, and wish that that very 
night the witches might give Dorkey another 
twist, so he could get his deed. This man Dor- 
key had the constant services of a witch-doctor, 
Elkin Snider. Snider was too lazy to work, but 
a little too sharp for the majority of people in 
the country. He made a splendid living out of 
their superstitions. He had already impover- 


128 


L,ife on a Backwoods Farm. 


ished Dorkey. A witch-doctor, you know, can 
not charge, and be paid a regular fee. You just 
put all the money you have in your outside 
coat pocket — on the left side. If there is any 
reserve, mental or financial, Ananias and Sap- 
phira-like, it will not work. The witch-doctor 
puts his hand in that pocket, and takes out a 
sum each trip. The amount is never to be 
counted, even by himself. One morning, after 
the witches had been distressingly quiet with 
Dorkey for more than a month, father mounted 
his horse and rode over to see Snider. He rode 
up to the gate, and called the doctor out. He 
told him he had bought Dorkey ’s farm, and 
that he was about to renege, and that he needed 
to be doctored for the witches till he was made 
honest enough to stand by his contract, or re- 
fund the money paid. Father handed him five 
dollars. Snider took the money, and, without 
looking at it, put it in his pocket, and turned 
abruptly around, and walked back into his 
cabin, and shut the door. Father saw that his 
interview with Snider had ended. He was puz- 
zled and displeased. But there was not much 
help for the situation. Here was one man a 
professional hypocrite; another engaged, to say 
the least, in a little sharp practice. There was 
a sense in which both understood the other per- 


Witches. 


129 


fectly. Neither believed in witches. Both had 
pecuniary interests in the beliefs of other peo- 
ple just then. As his money had gone out, 
father wanted a little more light on the subject ; 
but he did not get it. He sat in his saddle at 
the gate a few minutes, and then he said, in a 
rather commanding way: 

“ Hello, Snider — hello !” 

Snider came to the door again, and father 
said : 

“I just want to say, that if things do n’t turn 
out all right, your hide won’t hold shucks.” 

Snider, in a very solemn way, made a great 
salaam of a bow, and shut the door in his face 
again. 

There was nothing for the sharp practice 
man to do, but to turn his horse and go home. 
But he was full of puzzled reflections. He 
thought of the Negro’s remark, that “A white 
man is mighty onsartin.” He could at least 
say there was something in the witch business. 
He had five dollars in it, and probably three 
hundred more. He had no doubt about that 
five dollars doing the work, unless there was a 
ten-dollar interest on the Dorkey side. Of that 
he could not be sure. Some things time alone 
will tell. 

Snider went over to see Dorkey that after- 
9 


130 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

noon. He prognosticated around for more 
than two hours. He did a vast amount of 
mysterious maneuvering. He burned cobwebs I 
in the fire, and noticed that they did not make 
a blaze. He lit a candle, and burned rosin in , 
the flame, and noticed that the smoke went 
west in the room. He examined Dorkey’s fin- 
ger-nails, and then he began to look so serious, I 
that the deluded man became alarmed, and be- 
gan with his questions. 

“How is it, Doc? How does she stand?” 

The great doctor hesitated, but finally said: 

“ Bad enough ; this is the worst case I ever I 
saw. Do you want me now to be plain with 
you?” 

“ Well, I do n’t want any more torment. I 
have had enough of that from the witches.” 

“I might as well tell you. If my superior 
powers do not save a life when they may, then 
I am unworthy of my gifts. Dorkey, the 
witches have planned to kill you ; and if you 
do not cross the Wabash within sixty days, you 
will not be alive. Your safety is in getting out 
of this combination. Beyond the Wabash you 
will have peace. Mark my words, Dorkey ; 
mark my words !” 

The trade was closed, and the balance of the 
purchase money paid over, and Dorkey was 


Witches. 


131 

across the great waters in due time, and was 
never bothered with the witches any more. 

Is it right to work sharp practice on a man — 
to play on his credulity to induce him to be 
honest? I do not know. That is an ethical 
distinction too fine for me. I leave that to the 
ethical professors. I put down the facts, which, 
I presume, are of more interest to psychology 
than to moral science. 

Inside knowledge of this little history, as it 
occurred, had, to me, the value of relieving my 
mind of all fears on the subject of witches. I 
could thenceforward enjoy Copenhaver, and 
sleep after his monstrous recitals. 


CHAPTER XI. 

DANIEL AND THE GREAT DIPPER. 


“ The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firmament 
sheweth his handy work. 

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night shew- 
eth knowledge.” — Psalm. 

T HE summer I was eight years old, we moved 
to the witch-farm. The money received 
for Hazelgreen place had been put into it, and 
there was quite a sum left to invest in stock. 
We learned shortly that the Great Northwest, 
which was then Wisconsin and Minnesota, was 
in need of stock cattle. The condition out there 
was that of a newly-settled country, without its 
first equipment of stock. We decided to buy 
and drive into that region. For making this 
trip we had additional reason that mother’s 
health was breaking, and it needed recruiting 
by rest and travel, and outdoor life in summer. 
When our physician heard of the enterprise, he 
J 3 2 


Daniee and the Great Dipper. 133 

said : “ Go, by all means.” From fall till spring 
found us busy in preparation for the expected 
trip, to be taken the next spring and summer. 
There was one covered wagon, with an ox-team 
to haul the heavier equipments for camping — 
such as tents and provisions, and camp-stove 
and bedding, and the hundred smaller things 
necessary in a company of seven persons in all. 
The ox-team became the leaders of the herd — 
three hundred head in all. We also had a mule- 
team hitched to a spring-hack. This hack had 
double covers for mother’s protection. 

The day we started, I was made the owner 
of a little five-year-old yellow-roan horse, with a 
new bridle and a saddle and whip. Father 
says : 

“Rodney, he is yours, and you are. to ride 
him to Minnesota, and drive cattle all the way.” 

We were then in an hour of turning into the 
road. I led my new possession to the fence and 
mounted, and was as proud a boy as ever held 
a rein. Up to this time I had never known any- 
thing like regular employment. I had worked a 
few whole days, and was, with all boys, impressed 
with the dignity of constant labor. Here was a 
thing in which I could do a man’s work. So, 
with all the ecstasy of my first possession on me, 
I undertook my first great job. For three 


134 Life on a Backwoods Barm. 

months from that morning I never slept in a 
house, and never lost a day. It was my business, 
with the help of a quaint-looking shepherd-dog, 
to bring up the rear. Father, with the men, 
skirted the sides, and kept the cattle in the 
highway. The men took charge of the cattle 
at night, in which it was required that some 
one be awake all the time, to be ready in case 
of storm to keep the cattle from wandering, and 
in case of fright to protect the camp from the 
massed rushes they were sure to make. My 
business at night was to sleep. I attended to 
that faithfully. The men say that a storm one 
night blew the tent over, and the pelting rain 
poured into my face for three minutes, and I did 
not wake. That is doubtless apocryphal. The 
poetry of this journey and work was gone the first 
day. What a long, weary road it was ! — day after 
day, with that dog as my only companion, and 
with one of the men dropping back to hailing dis- 
tance occasionally, and with an occasional glimpse 
of the wagons a mile ahead, and all the way be- 
tween a long line of cattle, only two or three 
deep in the road, trudging along like the trained 
soldiers of an army. My business was to keep 
up the laggers, and, of necessity, I must perpet- 
ually nag the lazy brutes, who would get out of 
sight behind if not urged. That little roan-horse 


Daniel and the Great Dipper. 135 

turned out to be the quintessence of laziness. 

I wore out my cowhide the first week, and was 
refurnished with a spur on each heel. Eight 
hundred miles of this sort of travel I had; and 
I was not large enough to get on my horse out 
in the prairie without lengthening the stirrup- 
strap, and then taking it up again after mount- 
ing. After a few days I took the journey as a 
matter of course. I spent my time nudging up 
the same lazy brutes, which not only invariably 
dropped to the rear, but took the same side of 
the road, day after day. I would whip a certain 
one on a particular spot for a day, then I would 
change the spot. I finally learned the art of 
getting bullets from the shot-pouch in the ox- 
wagon, splitting them half-way with my pocket- 
knife, and pinching them over the new whip- 
cracker of each morning. I was astonished at 
the amount of persuasion there was in that 
bullet. The lazy things began soon to dread me, 
as they would a bald hornet, for that bullet 
raised the same kind of a welt. 

Out of the lonesomeness and monotony of 
this long journey I got three things. I became 
as skillful with a cattle-whip as a Texan cow- 
boy. I became a great roadside observer. In 
cattle and horse and dog there was no variety. 
But there was endless variety of view in going 


136 L,ife on a Backwoods Farm. 

over a strange road. There were different kinds 
of soil, and rocks, and shrubs, and flowers, and 
trees. Every turn in the road had a new pic- 
ture. Many a long, weary day was lost in the 
newness of view which nature gave. To get 
sight of a body of water was always a great at- 
traction. To know that we were to travel up 
the bank of a river for a few miles was a para- 
dise in prospect. A river-road is not a track 
along which people go to get somewhere. It 
is an art-gallery. You see landscape paintings 
there by a master. The eye never tires of the 
view. Now a gulch and a shallow ford; now a 
bluff of rugged rocks; now a great bend in 
the river, with ducks scudding away up its 
waters ; now a plunge into a dense overgrowth 
of trees, where the shadows stay through the 
noontide ; now the bursting of a great spring 
from the rocks, and running across the road to 
dash into a spray among the fragments and 
boulders below ; now the kerplunk of a turtle 
from a log; now a great, pearly-sided beauty 
showing himself above the water ; now the 
shrill notes of a kingfisher; now the sunshine 
laying a sheen of gold clear across the river, — 
all this had endless charms for my soul. 

It was the loneliness of this journey, the soli- 
tariness of my work, and the vexing and 


DanikIv and the Great Dipper. 


i37 


patience-taxing nature of it, that, first of all, 
drove me to look about me for some relief and 
diversion. I found it in the voices of nature. 
From the Wabash to St. Paul I can see every 
turn in that road to-day. Necessity often puts 
upon us a habit. One time it is good — another 
time it is bad. In this case the habit has been 
a benediction to my life. It is the habit of ob- 
servation of roadside beauties. And by beauty 
we mean all that is quaint, or picturesque, or 
sublime. To this day it is a positive delight to 
me to travel any country-road for the first time, 
for the changes and for the freshness of view it 
gives. 

There came to me also from this trip the 
quality of stick-to-itiveness. The power of per- 
sistent and continuous labor is not natural to a 
child. The most industrious boy wants relief 
from any sort of work directly. The habit of 
continuous labor, so necessary in the world’s 
work, is an acquisition. It is the requirement 
of grim necessity overcoming the weariness of 
the flesh. It may have been that I should have 
had an occasional day of relief from that monot- 
onous work. And, I believe, father saw that 
the work given me was too severe on a boy un- 
used to it. With every chance he had, he came 
to the rear, ostensibly to help me bring up the 


138 Life on a Backwoods Barm. 

lazy ones, but really to keep me company for 
the few minutes he could spare from his place 
with the herd. There was not a night in camp 
he did not look on me with pride. There was 
not a morning that I did not go out with the 
bravo of his good cheer, and the tonic of the 
men, who declared that I was doing all the 
work. I was half made to believe this, because 
I could seldom see the men at the sides, and it 
appeared to to me that I was driving that great 
mass of cattle alone. O11 rainy days the rubber 
suits went on, with storm-cap and leggins com- 
plete; and frequently from the driving rain we 
had to stop the march and turn the cattle under 
the lee of the hills, or bunch them in the prairie, 
and guard them about till the storm was over. 
Jonah was thankful for the gourd. In the blast 
of the rain I was certainly thankful for the rain- 
suit ; but I had no release from the job I had 
undertaken to drive clear through. This was 
characteristic of my father’s dealings with me till 
I was grown. Afterwards, a few years, there 
was in me, for a time, a spirit of resentment 
against the severity of what seemed to me then, 
all work and no play. Father was surcharged 
with business energy. He did not spare him- 
self. He was not disposed to spare others. His 
temper was to put all who had to do with him 


Daniel and the Great Dipper. 139 

on their mettle. He was not a hard man either. 
Capable men under him as workmen admired 
him. He could not tolerate laziness. He had 
no patience with a dolt. He had success in life, 
and he merited it. He followed no visionary 
schemes. He knew as if by instinct what it 
took to get honest results in any direction. 

My school-days were not neglected. I had 
really more odd spells to myself than I then 
thought ; but my time beyond that was not really 
my own. The busy press of work on the farm 
and with the herds would more than take up 
my time through the year. I had not the little 
liberties enjoyed by other boys in the neighbor- 
hood. Frequently it was so that the Fourth of 
July could not be taken. We were always loaded 
up with an immensity of work. But I am very 
sure that I was not kept in the press of the work 
for mercenary purposes — my work saving so 
much in hired help — for my father was at the 
farthest remove from the mercenary spirit. He 
was a money-maker. He loved the excitements, 
the push, and the risks of business ; but he did 
not love money for its own sake. He was not a 
miser. To his family he was lavish to prodigal- 
ity, for the times, and often in unexpected direc- 
tions. His investments were not always of the 
wisest kind ; for his domestic impulses mastered 


140 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

his judgment now and then, and in this respect 
there was a marked contrast with his business 
ventures. They expressed the fact to which he 
never gave expression in any other way, that he 
was living for his family. His whole life-work 
was a revelation of that fact. He did not see 
some of the larger things of the world, such as its 
philanthropies for the mass. He was not public- 
spirited in the broadest sense. But for his family 
he went beyond self as fully as ever Christian 
gave himself in complete surrender to Christ’s 
cause. He did not see much farther than his 
family. The limitations of advantage in early 
life prevented any broader view. His devotion 
to his family was the prompting of his affection. 
It held him through the vicissitudes of his life. 
It was the fountain of his strength and power. 
I can see now that it was his purpose and ambi- 
tion not to let me go into the world empty- 
handed in property values, and he did not wait 
till he died to express that purpose. I can see 
now, also, that he was all the time aware that 
money possessions alone would result in a curse 
instead of a blessing. I can see now that he be- 
stowed more care in giving me the personal in- 
vestments of industry and economy, with the 
added faculty of patient plodding, than in the 
bestowal of all other things. Since I have gone 


Daniel and the Great Dipper. 141 

beyond the smoke of his chimney to do for my- 
self, I have always been able to toil away from 
the year’s beginning to its end, and keep sweet 
over it. I make record here of this greatest in- 
heritance of training from my father. He did 
more for me than he knew. His work in build- 
ing into my life this thing, accomplished that in 
which modern educational methods most seri- 
ously fail. 

My father, after all, was, in the highest modern 
sense, an educated man. He had the faculty of 
putting himself into a special line of work, and 
of holding himself there for a lifetime. He put 
his whole thought and energy into it so that he 
knew his business, and he taught what he knew 
in the laboratory of practical life to those to 
whom he was responsible. The world to-day has 
no greater need than for this sort of workman- 
ship. The world has gone daft over societies, 
and clubs, and conventions, and general by-laws, 
and public position, and sociological problems, 
and political parties, and ballots, and eloquent 
sermons, and addresses. We tithe mint and 
anise, and neglect judgment and the love of God. 
Old-fashioned child-training doesn’t count. It 
has gone everlastingly out of date. That small- 
sized business has been turned over to nurses, 
and kindergartens, and Sunday-schools, and day- 


142 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

schools, and later the colleges and universities. 
We are personally so busy that we can not afford 
to look after that small household item, and we 
hire it done. We let it out in job-lots ; that is, 
we sub-let. The Almighty has an arrangement 
with mortals by which he proposes that one man 
married to one woman shall take charge of a 
number of these little immortals, and be re- 
sponsible for them. And the fact that he has 
quickly put a limit on the number given to one 
man and one woman signifies his judgment that 
the two are not ordinarily competent to take care 
of and do a first-class job of training one more 
than that number. Those who think that this 
work is a limitation of their powers, and that 
they had accomplished larger things if hasty 
impulse had not enthralled them, laugh in the 
face of God’s estimate of their abilities. 

But I am not to preach to you in telling you 
stories of my childhood. I only wanted to 
say here that my father, in my training, made 
probably the most that could be made out of the 
stuff. This from his side of things. My mother’s 
work on me was of another quality, and more 
fundamental. She had a woman’s view of the 
higher humanities and the love of God. 

We sold our cattle at highly remunerative 
prices to the Norwegian settlers who had recently 


Daniel and the Great Dipper. 143 

taken possession of parts of Wisconsin and 
Minnesota, and were still living in sod-houses. 
In the latter part of the summer we returned, 
satisfied that our eyes had not in all the journey 
seen so fine a farm as the one we bought from 
the witch-ridden Dorkey. 

The spring following, there was a fine pros- 
pect of harvest ; and as a declaration of war 
against the old cradle and sickle, a newly-in- 
vented McCormick harvester was purchased. It 
was a rude affair compared with what we have 
to-day. It was as heavy as a sawmill. It 
rattled like a threshing-machine. Less than 
four horses could not move it, and when it went 
at all, they had to go in a trot. The whole 
neighborhood was suspicious of it, not having 
seen anything of the kind before. The common 
sentiment was that it would no more work than 
a machine of perpetual motion. And there were 
some plain declarations of opposition on the 
ground that it would abolish the whisky -jug and 
the harvest jamboree. This, it was agreed, could 
never be done with men who knew their rights, 
and no man would ever get his grain up in that 
country without these two things. If this new- 
fangled affair worked, the harvest would be over 
in a jiffy, and there would be no time for a drunk 


144 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

and a good tune. One glorious June morning 
this holy terror was put to work ; and the fences 
around were lined with the whole male creation 
of the township, come to see the fun. Now and 
then, as the men would stop to blow the horses, 
or oil, or give the binders time to get out of the 
way, one of these fence-rail gents, who prided 
himself on his level head, would walk up to the - 
machine, look at it, then walk back a few steps 
and spit. He would repeat this performance 
unconsciously till the machine would start to its 
work. The only effect it seemed to have on him 
was to excite his salivary glands. 

A nine-year-old boy, of course, did not see all 
of these things at the time ; and they are re- 
ported here in perspective — they are the com- 
plexes of truth. 

One event that morning was to me real and 
of lasting remembrance. It was my business 
to get water to the field for the men. My dog, 
Daniel, was a constant companion. This animal 
came to our house the fall before, out of a home, 
and I adopted him. For years following he was 
my fast friend — the best I had in one sense ; for 
if I abused him in fits of anger, he would lick 
my hand the moment I wanted to make up. 
Daniel could not talk, but he knew nearly 
everything I said. In some things he knew 







. 







■- 











. 




















































































































































Mnrnfnn 


w* ■ 

+ - 

v- 



RODNEY AND DANIEL 



Daniee and the Great Dipper. 145 

more than I did. This morning he was unfor- 
tunate. He had gone into the uncut wheat and 
was after some kind of small game ; and not 
being used to harvesters, the first information he 
had was the sickle whacking at his tail ; and before 
he could get it out of the way he got it whacked 
off twice, or nearly so — the first time clear off, 
and the next four inches two-thirds off, so that 
the piece hung to one side. I took the piece 
that was cut off and carried it around with me 
for a while, and tried to fasten it on with mullein- 
leaves and inside strips of hickory-bark. Daniel 
was inconsolable. I then tried to cut off the 
clipped piece ; but I lacked courage, and the dog 
was unwilling. The tail finally healed and left 
the cut piece on ; but that part was always at a 
positive angle to the other part of the tail. 

This mishap made Daniel the object of con- 
stant remark. I believe he knew how it looked, 
and was humiliated by it. For the next five 
years I seldom met a stranger but what I had to 
answer the question: “What is the matter with 
that dog’s tail?” 

Over the alarming variety of answers these 
strangers received, I came near losing my “ rep- 
utation for truth and veracity.” 

Daniel was an honest dog, but after the ac- 

icdent his spirit seemed to be somewhat broken. 

10 


146 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

His speciality in the hunt was the opossum. 
He would take them from under logs and from 
old stumps in the day-time, and at night his de- 
light was to run them up bushes so small, that 
I could bend over the bush till he could get at 
them. I have climbed persimmon- trees, and 
have shaken the lubberly things down to him. 
A part of the first experience I had in taking 
this kind of game was not very pleasant. The 
dog caught it as I shook it from the bush, and, 
with a slight shake, to all appearance, it was 
dead. I wanted to save the pelt, and took the 
dog off, and took it by the tail and started home. 
Presently I felt that caudal curiosity tightening 
around my wrist. I let go my hold, and tried to 
jerk loose. I got scared, and jerked so hard I 
fell down, with the “possum” on top. Daniel, 
thinking the fight was on again, pitched in, and 
with the first nip, the “ possum ” waked up, 
and made his best fight; and I was not able to 
get out from under till the fight was over. They 
had it out right there over me. I got up, scratched 
and scared out of my wits, but otherwise un- 
hurt. 

The fame of my dog in his specialty brought 
me quite a number of invitations from other 
boys to go with them at night for the training 
pf their dogs. I went one night with two not 


Daniel and the Great Dipper. 147 

very reputable fellows, each older and a third 
larger than myself. We had caught two very 
large ones, and were ready to go home. We 
were sitting on a half-decayed log, and there 
came up some little contention about who 
should have the game. In these special train- 
ing times I had been getting the catch, the 
other boys feeling well paid if their “pups” 
could get the hang of the business through the 
older dog. These boys proposed to divide the 
game with themselves, with the argument to 
me that I had a better chance to get more than 
they had. And to end the matter, suddenly, 
without provocation, one of the boys whirled a 
large opossum into the air, and brought it 
down over me with such terrific force as to 
knock me sprawling into the leaves. With this, 
both boys broke into the dark, in a great guf- 
faw of laughter, each taking an opossum and 
making for home. My dog came to me presently, 
and we went home. The stroke was such a fear- 
ful one, that the whole structure of my left 
lung was jarred and damaged, so that I have 
carried a weak lung to this day, and have been 
a great sufferer. I kept the event to myself, 
and meditated revenge. But a fortnight from 
this time that boy took acute pneumonia, and 
died in twelve hours. Before he died he 


148 I^iFK on a Backwoods Farm. 

asked to see me. I went to his bedside, and 
he said: 

“ Rodney, I am going to die. I want you 
to have that opossum-pelt. It is. out in the 
wood-house, stretched on a board.” 

Was this his way of repentance? When he 
offered me the pelt, did he mean all the rest? 
Was this a way Providence had of telling me 
that I need not go into the revenge business, or 
take the weight of such responsibilities on my 
blessed shoulders? 

I had another vivid experience, growing out 
of the fame of this dog in his specialty. I was 
given a respite of two half-days and a night 
between them, and I took Daniel with me on 
a visit to a couple of cousins, who lived fifteen 
miles away in the river-bottom. One of these 
boys was older, and one younger than myself. 
We went for a night-hunt in the heavy timber 
in the bottom. I was not acquainted with the 
region, and hesitated to go far from the road or 
the river bank. The two boys declared they 
knew the whole ground, and boldly led the way 
into the heart of the woods. We went chasing 
to and fro, and were having great success ; but 
it was not long till I did not know my bearings. 
Presently the younger boy said, “I do n’t know 
which way home is, no more nor nutliin’.” 


DanikIv ane the* Great Dipper. 149' 

The older boy declared his knowledge of 
things, and boldly pushed on; but it was not 
three minutes from the time he found we were 
lost, till we saw that he was trying to find his 
way out of the woods. As soon as we found 
we were lost, our zest in the hunt was gone. 
We were not tired. We were not hungry. We 
were not cold. We were lost. We did not 
know the way home. That fact changed the 
whole aspect of things. The dogs were in pur- 
suit of other game, but we did not follow them. 
The enjoyment of that night-hunt hung on a 
thing we did not appreciate till it was gone from 
us. Our bearings — that was one thing; the 
hunt was another. 

When we are done with this hot chase of a 
life, do we know the way home ? In the things 
we have pursued, have we been successful; and 
all the while have the points of life’s compass 
been clear to us? 

We called the dogs in directly. We had 
now more important business on hand. We 
traveled for an hour or two, and we were evi- 
dently going in a circle, for we came to a small 
tree we had cut, when we thought we were 
miles from it. We tried every expedient to find 
our direction. We knew the dogs were not lost. 
They were better off than we were. We tried 


150 IyiFE on a Backwoods Barm. 

to drive them home, and each cur went in his 
* own direction. We remembered that in the 
evening the wind was in the northwest, so we 
built a fire to see the direction of the flames and 
smoke. That was a failure. The smoke would 
go first in one direction, and then in another. 

We knew that in the bottoms the moss grew 
on the north sides of the trees. We went down 
on our knees to feel of the roots of the trees. 
It was no use. The moss was either all around, 
or there was none at all. My dog came up to me 
while I was down at the root of a tree, and put 
his nose into my face with a questioning look, as 
if to say, “ Have you treed something?” I felt 
humiliated. That dog knew the way home. 
As compared with my dog, I had an overplus of 
reason, but very clearly an underplus of instinct. 
There can be a state for mortals wherein it were 
better to be a brute. Than to be what I am, an 
immortal spirit, and not know the way home 
when the hunt of life is over, I had rather be a 
dog, or a stone, or a stick, or a snake, or any- 
thing I can think of. 

The highest pleasure of all human activities 
depends largely on fundamental things that seem, 
in a sense, to be separate from the human interests 
themselves. If these things so necessary to our 
enjoyment or success in life go from us, either 


Daniee and the Great Dipper. 151 

by carelessness or neglect, we shall be engaged 
in none other than works of folly. The happi- 
ness of this life depends on a knowledge of the 
way out of it when we are done with it. 

We had come to a point where we were wan- 
dering around aimlessly among the trees, trying 
to make an estimate of how hungry we would 
be before we should be found and taken out. 

One thing we knew — we wanted to go north 
to the river, and to the road on its bank. Which 
way was north? We needed another item of 
knowledge to complete things. We were in the 
condition of the two Irishmen in Texas. They 
left their camp early in the morning, and 
hunted aimlessly all day with a compass in 
pocket, and feeling safe over the fact. When 
the sun had gone about down, they laid that 
compass on a log, and one said: “This is east; 
this is west; and this is north ; and this is south ;” 
and the other one said: “Good enough; and now 
where is the camp?” 

We said, “Where is north?” We came to a 
slight opening in the tree-tops, and we saw the 
sky clear. All these years I had remembered 
the few lessons in star-gazing father had taught 
me as I sat on his knee outside the door of the 
Hazelgreen cabin, in the gloamings of pleasant 
evenings. He had pointed out to me the great 


152 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


and little dipper, so that I could find them any 
night when I had command of the sky; but 
what could be done in this timber? I had enough 
hope that I might see the great dipper, to look 
out through a slight opening of the trees. There 
it was, standing out as brilliantly as stars ever 
shine. I gave a yell, and the dogs broke into 
the darkness in quest of game they supposed to 
be near. Lewis, the older boy, said: 

“What’s the matter now, Rodney! Better 
wait till we get out of here before you take 
a fit!” 

“We will go out now,” I said. “Come here 
a minute — you and Ambrose.” 

The boys came and stood behind me. One 
said : 

“What do you see now — a ’coon, and what 
do you want with him?” 

“No; do you see that bright star just in the 
edge of the leaves of that hackberry?” 

“Yes.” 

“That is the North Star.” 

“O pshaw!” said Lewis. “I don’t know 
where we are ; but I know that is nearer south 
than north.” 

“Now, you two boys listen to me, or I will 
leave you here in the woods. I am going out of 


Daniee and the Great Dipper. 153 

here. Put your heads as close to mine as you can 
get them now, and let me show you. Do you see 
four large stars out here, nearly in the form of 
a square — the upper ones slightly farther apart 
than the lower ones?” 

“Yes; what of that?” 

“That is the bowl of the great dipper.” 

“ Dipper fiddlesticks,” said Lewis. 

“Now, do you see three large stars running 
out from this bowl, and making a curve away 
into the top of that sycamore?” 

“Yes; but yer handle is on the bottom of yer 
bowl,” said Lewis, in reply. 

“Maybe that is the way they make dippers 
up there,” retorted Ambrose, beginning to yield 
the point, or beginning to catch at a straw, I do 
not know which. 

“Now, you see the two outer stars in the 
bowl of that dipper are in a line with that great 
star yonder, and that is the North Star. Come 
this way now about ten feet. Do you see four 
smaller stars almost in a square, as you look to 
the left of that dead snag, and then three stars 
running out from them to the North Star?” 

“No.” 

“ Look awhile.” 

“O yes, I see it !” said Ambrose. 


i54 IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 

“So do I,” said Lewis. 

“The stars in the handle of that point toward 
the North Star.” 

I had carried my point. Lewis, now, by right 
of the sovereignty of superior age, became the 
leader of the expedition out of the woods. 

What a difficult matter it is to trace a star 
through the tree-tops at night! Lewis cleared 
the way, and Ambrose cut a joint-pole by which 
I was led, so that I had one business — that of 
keeping my eye on the star. We came to a 
bayou. I stood on the bank and watched the 
star, while a boy ran each way to see if there 
was any way around. They returned after a time, 
reporting no way around. We must wade or swim. 
Lewis started in and waded across, the water up 
to his breast. In the middle of the bayou, he 
asked me if I saw the star. Ambrose, with the 
water up to his chin, asked the same question. 
When I was in the water up to my neck, both 
boys on the other bank, simultaneously asked me 
if I saw that star. For two hours we groped our 
way on the other side, and at the last we came to 
the river-road, and were at home in half an hour. 
The folks at the house were getting ready to go 
in search. We were tired then. We were wet 
and hungry, and we were wiser and less pre- 
sumptuous. 


Daniel and the Great Dipper. 155 

How great are the things to attract and in- 
terest the mind in this overshadowed world ! 
And it is not out of harmony with the fitness of 
things that we enter into all that they have for 
us ; but like the North Star from the woodland, 
we need to keep our eye on the realities that are 
so great that no change is apparent from any 
point of view. The movements of the planets, we 
are told, are double. One is the motion around 
their own axes ; the other is in the planes of their 
movements with the other planets around a com- 
mon center. Life has two focals of influence: 
one is the hunt, the other is the compass-point, 
for service after the hunt is over. The orbit of 
this life has its attraction and value ; but we are 
in the sweep of that larger orbit from time to 
eternity. This is a momentous fact. It is as if 
we had been taken by one hand to be lifted to 
that city which hath foundations, while the other 
has been left free to hammer the iron, or push 
the plane, or drive a nail, or hold the plow, or 
garner the grain, or execute the law, or wield the 
sword, or dig in the mines, or guide a ship, or 
write a poem, or build a palace, or carve a statue, 
or train a child, or save a soul. 


CHAPTER XII. 

ANIMAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

“Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake : 

‘ Go, from the creatures thy instruction take. 

Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield ; 
Learn from the beasts the physic of the field ; 

The arts of building from the bee receive ; 

Learn from the mole to plow, the worm to weave ; 
Learn of the little nautilus to sail, 

Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale. 

Here, too, all forms of social union find, 

And hence let reason, late, instruct mankind.’ ” 

—Pope. 

T O learn and know the characteristics of ani- 
mals and birds, tame and wild, is an educa- 
tion in itself. It is a kind of acquisition not re- 
ceived from books. It is laboratory-work. The 
small attention given now to this sort of knowl- 
edge, and the little importance attached to it, is 
not to the credit of our educational methods. 
Mr. Darwin strongly hints that these are our 
kinfolks. If this be so, then a knowledge of 
156 



Animal Characteristics. 157 

animal life is necessary to an understanding of 
our own. Reason is not a distinguishing feature 
of human life. Reason is a thing of degrees, 
and the animals have it. Animals learn by ex- 
perience as we do. They may not have the sub- 
reflective intellectual element, but they grow 
wiser as they grow older. They have memory, 
sorrow, courage, ferocity, strategy, deceit, reason, 
conscience. I put these down, because they are 
all well known to every country boy in all the 
land. One pound of plain observation is worth 
a hundred pounds of psychological theory. 

A school-teacher, boarding at our house, was 
one evening explaining to father how it was 
that an ox knew that grass was green ; and that 
a man knew that grass was green ; and that a 
man knew that he knew that grass was green ; 
and that an ox did not know that he knew that 
grass was green — and that was the difference be- 
tween the animal and the human mind. 

Father said : 

“ Do you see old Daniel lying there by the fire?” 

“ Yes; what of that?” 

“Do n’t you believe he is feeling good?” 

“Yes ; for he is probably neither hungry nor 
cold.” 

“How do you know that he doesn’t know he 
is feeling good?” 


158- 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


“The point is not there.” 

“Then how do you know that he doesn’t 
know that he knows that he is feeling good?” 

“Because the animal mind does not possess 
that double reflex of power. It can not turn any 
such an introspective somersault.” 

“Neither can a wheelbarrow climb a tree. 
But that does not settle the issue. I have been 
outwitted so often by this animal life about me, 
that I do not think very much of my mental 
superiority. My distinguishing features must be 
in other things. If this lower world of life, as 
we call it, had language as the storage and ex- 
pression of thought, that might put into it the 
principle of progress ; and man himself would be 
astonished, and put to his wits to keep ahead. 
There is a rudimentary language down here now, 
that has in it more than man has ever learned of 
it. The animals know more of our language 
than we know of theirs.” 

“I think you are correct there, Mr. Blanner- 
hassett,” said the pedagogue. 

“Then who is the smartest? Animals know 
much of what we say to them. My cattle all 
know me. I go into the lot in the morning, 
and they follow me to the edge of the lot and 
ask me for a wisp of hay. They say plainly as 
any thing: ‘Give me a wisp of hay.’” 


Animat Characteristics. 159 

Snifkins, the itinerant shoe-cobbler, was there 
that night, patching our poor soles. He seemed 
to wake up all at once, with a sly twinkle in 
his left eye, and break into the argument with 
a regular landslide: 

“There is nothing at all remarkable about 
that, Rube Blannerhassett. I went down into a 
lot the other day, where there was a bunch of 
cattle, and I had n’t the least acquaintance with 
any of them. There was an old bull down there, 
who not only followed me to the edge of the 
lot, but he lilted the gate off its hinges, and 
raced with me clear down to the house in the 
most familiar manner possible. He might have 
asked me for a wisp of hay if I had stopped 
long enough; but I did not want to keep the 
folks waiting for dinner — and — I — just hung 
one-half of my coat-tail and a part of my pants 
on the bull’s horns, and went in the house.” 

The cobbler then subsided into silence for 
the rest of the evening. Father rallied from 
this sally in a few minutes, and proceeded with 
his argument to down the school teacher. 

“I saw a two-year-old steer once that un- 
derstood German. I was taking a bunch of 
fifty head from one of the lower counties home, 
and stopped over night with a Dutchman. Dur- 
ing the night his cattle broke their inclosure, 


160 IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 

and were mixed with mine in the morning. I 
separated them, as I thought, and started on; 
and after nightfall that day, the Dutchman 
overtook me, and said I had one of his steers. 
His Dutch was up. I gave him assurance that 
a thing of that kind would be made right ; so 
next morning he pointed out his steer. I told 
him where I purchased that animal, and what 
I paid for him. 

“He says: ‘I call dat stere to me, and de 
oders vill never mind vat I sed.’ I consented to 
that test, of course. He began the strangest sort 
of cattle-calling I ever heard, and that steer put 
up his head, and came running to lick the Dutch- 
man’s hand for salt. I surrendered on the spot, 
traded with him, paid him the difference, and 
more, because he had me; paid him for his 
time, and his bill over night. The steer I left 
was a dead match for the one I took. 

“There is a difference between the flap of a 
pigeon’s wing after an acorn, and the flap of that 
wing in fright. The last will set every wing in 
the flock in motion. Wild geese in their migra- 
tions through the sky are organized; and when 
they feed, they make one of their number a sen- 
tinel on guard ; and when they are through, he 
feeds while they watch. One honk from the 
sentinel puts every head up, and another puts 


Animat Characteristics. 161 

them on the wing. We are all familiar with the 
peculiar sign of the mother quail, that sends 
every little broodling into the nearest tuft of 
grass, and yon may put on your specks, and you 
will never find a one; but you can see the 
mother bird playing broken leg and wing so per- 
fectly, that you half suspect it is so, even when 
you know better. A colony of bees knows more 
about geometry than most people. An ant-hill 
in the barnyard illustrates the principle of self- 
government in a better way than any known 
form of human society.” 

“You may be right,” said the pedagogue ; 
“but what do yon call that?” 

“I have no name for it. The thing itself is 
greater than the name. It is part of the mystery 
of life. It is a school in which we shall not 
graduate soon. There is more in it than in half- 
your colleges. Turn a boy out among these 
things , and he will learn them faster than in any 
school .” 

“Are you opposed to the schools, then?” 

“No. The schools are good and necessary, 
unless they undertake to monopolize the busi- 
ness of imparting knowledge. Shall nothing 
count in a child’s life except the things he gets 
from a printed book?” 

“ I do as you did to the Dutchman ; I sur- 


162 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

render,” said the teacher ; and the conversation 
closed. 

Animals soon learn that a moving object 
catches the eye quickly, and they make use of 
it for their own protection. A rabbit will lie in 
the thick grass till he is kicked out. One morn- 
ing I was waked before day to go to the hill- 
pasture to look after the grazers. I had gone 
through the bottom, crossed the creek, climbed 
the bluff on the other side, which was so steep 
that I had to pull myself up by the bushes that 
grew up out of beds of matted ferns ; and when 
I reached the summit I stopped a moment for 
breath. A vision of beauty was before me. 
Over the knolls of the high grass-land lay a 
hundred fat cattle, their glossy sides yet wet 
with the night-dew they had not yet risen to 
shake off. Behind me were great stretches of 
timber ; and this elevation was above the tallest 
monarchs. For miles up the valley could be 
seen patches of the silver stream that flowed 
almost immediately below me. The gray streaks 
had gone from the east, and the borders of the 
sky were lit up with crimson and orange and 
gold, the last prophecy of the morning. But the 
finest lines to all this beauty were just before 
me. Not more than twelve feet away, on the 


Animat Characteristics. 163 

body of a small blue-ash tree, lay as pretty a 
little gray squirrel as my eyes ever saw. Not a 
muscle moved ; but I was so near that my eye 
caught the breathing. I tried to trace the out- 
lines of that squirrel on the tree. On one side I 
could, but on the other side, from whence came 
the shadows of the forest, the squirrel and the 
bark of the tree faded perfectly into each other. 
The frightened little animal was as still as death 
till I went near enough to lay my hand on it; 
then it dashed up the tree with a great clatter. 
I went home that morning with a song in my 
soul. All the reality of that scene is with me 
to-day. It is my own, to remain mine forever. 

It is conceded that the fox-squirrel is the 
smartest little animal of the forest. He is as 
foxy as a fox, and, besides, he is brainy. In 
Harper’s famous picture, “All Sorts in our Class,” 
the artist does well to put the fox-squirrel up 
head. There is where he belongs in the animal 
world. With a single hunter he stands more 
than even chances for escape. He knows the 
difference between a live hunter and his coat 
and hat ; and he can be depended on to keep on 
the safe side of a limb. I found a fox-squirrel 
one afternoon cutting hickory-nuts in a tree 
about fifty feet from his den. I got a shot, but 
so close was he to the limb, that I judge I only 


164 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

scorched the hair of his neck or shoulder. I was 
taking my time for re-loading, as I knew he 
could not get from that tree to the others by the 
limbs, and the dog would get him at the roots 
if he went down ; but in a moment he came part 
way down the body, and ran out the longest limb 
toward me, and from its extremest tip he made 
a spring, aiming to strike me directly in the face. 
I dodged him, but he went past my head with a 
brush, and before I could rally from my aston- 
ishment, and collect my wits, he was away, and 
up the den-tree and safe. He escaped in the 
only possible way. It was a daring and danger- 
ous leap — a game of bluff, if you please — but it 
worked. It was a plan , finely wrought out in 
only a moment of time, under the most intelli- 
gent apprehension of the circumstances, and 
with no little knowledge of human nature ; and 
it was executed with remarkable precision, and 
tact, and courage, and strategy. 

A boy out with a gun is an untamed vandal. 
He shoots to hear himself shoot, and kills things 
he ought to let live. For a number of years 
two bald-eagles had nested in a very large but 
half-dead oak-tree that stood on the knoll of an 
open cattle-pound by the side of the reservoir. 
At the time of this incident the young ones had 


Animat Characteristics. 165 

been hatched and fed till they had grown too 
large for the nest, and they had pitched off into the 
underbranches of the neighboring timber. This 
I did not know till one afternoon I entered the 
woods, coming up from the lower bend of the 
lake ; and I saw one of the lubberly things sit- 
ting on a limb quite a distance away ; and with 
no other object except to kill something, I made 
a careless shot and broke its wing. It came tp 
the ground, and when I approached it, it went 
floundering away under the trees, snapping at 
me, and making great cries for help. Help came. 
There was a swoop of heavy wings, and great 
talons piercing my hat, cutting my head, and 
leaving me bareheaded. When I saw the mother 
bird she had risen fifty feet among the trees, and 
was turning to renew the attack. I struck at 
her with the gun as she returned, missed my 
stroke, and fell sprawling into the leaves. She 
was emboldened by my discomforture, and by 
what certainly appeared to her a speedy victory. 
She flapped herself into the tops of the trees for 
an attack fiercer than ever. I could do nothing 
with the gun. The battle was on, and there was 
no time for any sort of preparation, even to the 
picking up of a club. There was. nothing to do 
but to stand up and fight, naked-handed. I was 
not in danger of my life, but of being fearfully 


i66 


IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 


wounded. From the dip she made in the air I 
could see that she intended to strike me squarely 
in a battle of life and death. I braced myself 
and she dashed into my hands, with beak and 
talons buried in my wrists. The blow knocked 
me over ; and as I threw her from me, it seemed 
that my wrists were cut off, and both my hands 
went with her. She was over me again in a 
moment. I was on my back, with my boots in 
the air, doing some tall kicking. She made 
several charges on my boots, and I did some 
dexterous turning to keep the impromptu fortifica- 
tion next to the enemy. So the battle went on — 
only for a few moments, I suppose ; but it 
seemed an hour. The wounded eaglet had gone 
into hiding and become quiet ; and with the fury 
of the mother bird assuaged by this, she flew 
out through the tree-tops and was gone. I was 
willing, to call it a drawn battle. I had been 
ready to quit from the start. I was suffering 
with my wounded hands and wrists, but I was 
thankful I was not dead. I went home with 
nothing for the day’s hunt but what I got in 
education. I think I needed that particular 
scourging. Afterwards I could have killed her; 
but in admiration of her courage and splendid 
fighting qualities, I let her go. 



BREASTWORKS NEXT TO THE ENEMY 






Animal Characteristics. 167 

The next summer these two eagles nested in 
the same tree. My respect for the female since 
she gave me such a fight, was so great that I 
took profound interest in them ; and as I spent 
the summer largely in the fields in sight, I had 
an opportunity to watch their movements from 
the early spring days to late August, when the 
young and old ones were not easily distinguished. 
First, there was the rude packing of dry sticks 
and willow branches and thorn-brambles into 
the decayed fork of the oak-tree ; then the love- 
making, the nesting, and the great flight of 
the birds. It was a common thing to see them 
about eight o’clock in the morning start into 
the sky, and quickly fly out of sight, and then, 
swift as a bullet, they would drop down again, 
and sweep away to the dead trees standing 
in the water on the farther side of the lake. 
What a fierce, wild spirit they had ! The eagle 
takes first place among birds. It was a fitting 
thing that the conquering Roman legions were 
led to victory by the eagle emblem in pure gold. 
The eagle is the adopted American bird, and is 
finely expressive of the American character. 
What boldness, what daring, and swiftness of 
flight and endurance, and, withal, what a high 
spirit! 


1 68 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

The fable has it that an eagle one morning 
made a visit to an owl in the underbranches of 
the forest. 

“Good morning,” said the eagle. “I have 
come to make you a friendly call, and to ask you 
if you would not like to take a fly with me into 
the morning air to-day?” 

“ I am glad you have come to see me,” said 
the owl; “but I do not greatly enjoy the morn- 
ings ; I prefer the splendid melancholy and 
silence of these shadows.” 

“But, my friend, the sunshine is so much 
better than the darkness. The day is better 
than the night. The day was certainly not 
made for this hiding, and the night was not 
made for activity, but for rest. It appears to 
me your tribe is coming, more and more, under 
the thrall of darkness. If your ancestors had 
fought against this drooping love of sitting on a 
limb in the shade, your species had not been so 
owlish to-day. For your race there is yet time 
to retrieve. Spurn the darkness. Kiss the sun- 
light. Feave this dismal swamp. Take a whirl 
or two each morning into the upper air.” 

“You are certainly a vivacious bird,” said the 
owl, sagely. “I know you belong to a species 
greater than mine, and I do not care for a con- 
troversy with you. I have heard your screams 


Animal Characteristics, 169 

overhead, and have spent no little time in com- 
parison of my contemplative and philosophic 
spirit with yours; and I have not been able 
wholly to commend either my own course or 
yours. I only know that, through heredity and 
the manner of my own life, I have a special 
adaptation and liking to these shadows.” 

“ I am aware that you are in my power,” said 
the eagle ; “ but at present I am neither hungry 
nor belligerent. My contention is that, as birds 
of prey, your species would be greatly helped 
and advantaged by getting out of the swamps. 
Come, take a fly with me into the heavens.” 

“I am honored with your visit, and I accept 
your courtesies,” said the owl. With that they 
pitched through the tree-tops into the air, one 
screaming, the other blinking his eyes. 

“This is too bright for me,” said the owl. 

“Come on,” said the eagle. “It is better 
farther up. This first glimpse you have is like 
the blinding of the snow. You will see glorious 
beauties directly.” 

“My wings are getting weary, and I must re- 
turn to the shade,” said the owl. 

“Come up higher, and you will reach the 
fountains of the pure air,” said the eagle. 

“I am blinded in this light, and I bid you 
good-day,” said the owl, as he turned in search 


170 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

of the shadows; and the eagle went on to meet 
the sun. 

When circumstances are greater than the 
creature, there is degradation. It is so with 
the human spirit. To surrender to them is to 
perish. To conquer and make use of them is to 
live forever. 

The most interesting period in the nesting of 
these two eagles was after the eggs had been 
hatched, and the old birds had begun to feed 
their young. Then were they fiercest in fight, 
as I had already learned. Then were they most 
skillful in taking the finest fish of the lake. 
Then was there a daily clatter of young and old 
over the nest. The young ones soon became 
too large for the nest. From down and pin- 
feather they had come to full plumage. One 
day a crisis came. It occurred in eagle language 
and life, and I translate it here. 

A fine fish had been brought from the waters, 
torn to tidbits, and put into the mouths of the 
young ones, and the mother bird then said to 
them: 

“My children, have we not taken good care 
of you to this day?” 

“ Yes, yes,” said both the young ones. 

“Have you not had the best fish of this lake, 


Animal Characteristics. 171 

with young rabbit, and quail, and grouse, and 
pheasant for your food ; and have we not shel- 
tered you in the storm, and stood vigil over you 
at night?” 

“All that, all that!” said the sleepy squabs. 

“Well, do you know you are getting too large 
for this nest? Besides it is not for an eagle to 
lie in a nest and be fed. You are about grown 
now, and grown eagles know how to fly. See 
here now, come with me ;” and with this she 
bounded into the air, and filled it with such vig- 
orous calls that quite an amount of spirit was 
shown by the eaglets. They stood up in the 
nest, shook their great wings, and made crying 
complaint; then they tumbled back into the nest 
to keep out of danger, and let well enough alone, 
as they had wanted for no good thing till that 
hour. Then the mother bird became enraged. 
She snapped her beak over them till they cowered 
into the sticks. She tore the nest from under 
them, and left them clutching to the bare tree. 
She pushed one off, and it went floundering 
toward the ground. She was under it in a mo- 
ment, and carried it a thousand feet into the 
sky, then let it go. What a tumbler! Half 
way to the ground it got its balance, and made 
an angle for the ground a half mile away, and 
lay panting, with wings outstretched, on the 


172 L,ife on a Backwoods Farm. 

meadow; but for the first time in its life it felt 
the thrill of the eagle spirit. During this time 
the male bird caught the other eaglet, and flew 
with it into the sky, and let it go. With this 
struggle in the air, the eagle spirit was awak- 
ened, and to fly became with them a consuming 
passion. 

I would rather be an eagle than an owl. 
To choose a high course, and pursue it, is 
to master all circumstances. The contempla- 
tion of high thoughts and purposes is exalting, 
and it is a sign of victory. To be fed and cared 
for, and to grow fat, is to remain a squab. We 
never accomplish what we never undertake. 
There is no success without effort. Strength 
and confidence come of effort. We know our 
faculties and powers by experiment. To reach 
the great end of life, we must get beyond the 
idea of physical protection. The young eaglets 
really were as safe in the air as in the nest. 
The brooding wings were to see that they did 
not fall; but they were of much greater value in 
teaching them to fly. It were better for the 
young eagles to be dashed to death on the ground 
than to remain in the nest. To make no trial of 
powers, is to court the extinction of the species. 
Eagles do not tolerate a broodling if it makes no 
heroic effort to fly. We see in this the meaning 


AnimaI Characteristics. 173 

of effort and struggle. The world expects young 
people to undertake something. In honor, it 
does not care what. Eagles do not care which 
way the young ones fly ; but they will slay them 
if they do not try to fly; and in great reason, for 
in that case they had better be dead than alive. 

Einger around the home-nest till the powers 
are plumed, and then dare and do. Choose an in- 
dividual struggle with the world. To be a de- 
pendent, is to become a weakling, sooner or 
later. Have you the stuff in you to plan your 
own life ? Then cast everything in the issue to 
achieve or die, and you will not die. You shall 
have life, and a place here and for evermore. 

Naturally we expect wild animals of every 
species to save themselves by flight when pur- 
sued. This is the rule, except with the skunk. 
He comes toward you at sight. He is a very 
confiding and friendly little animal. If you are 
anywhere about his den, he would rather be near 
you than not. He will meet you half way any 
time. He will walk between your legs, and put 
his fore paws against your boots like a pet cat. 
You would think he had known you always, and 
yet you do not feel like offending him. You 
look for him to see his mistake directly, and run 
away and mind his own business ; but he still 


174 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

confides in you. You do not feel like letting 
him know that he is officious. You hesitate to 
kick him, or hit him with a stick, or even kill 
him on the spot. You keep quiet, and wish he 
would excuse himself. You call him all the 
pretty names you can think of, and slowly walk 
away, all the while feeling peacefully uncomfort- 
able for fear he will be mean and troublesome. 
And if you make your escape, you do so with an 
exhilarated feeling, as if you had gone into some 
high region, where the air was full of ozone. 
This has an application to life. 

One autumn day I went into the hickory- 
groves north of the reservoir to lay in my winter 
supply of nuts. As I was tying my horse in the 
edge of the grove I heard the crack of a rifle, 
and I looked up to see two men turn a beef on 
its side from where the gun had dropped it, 
and with a knife they bled it there on the 
ground. This was a familiar sight to me, and, 
without further attention to it, I turned into the 
woods near by, and began to fill my sack with 
nuts. The ground here was literally covered, 
and it became a question as to how great a 
weight I could fill and put across the saddle. 
For three or four hours I worked away, and 
hardly looked up. The butchers had loaded 


Animat Characteristics. 175 

their beef and gone ; but they had done a thing 
not allowed by the owners of cattle on the 
prairie. They had killed this animal where the 
herds could get to the blood and scent it. It was 
understood that a thing of this kind should not 
be done, because it brought about quite a num- 
ber of unfortunate and unprofitable conditions. 
Cattle turned upon the open prairie are not dis- 
posed to range everywhere. With care they can 
be made to keep a limit of territory, say of two 
or three miles around, and this without herding. 
The leading cattle raisers of the country had an 
understanding about the ranges of their herds ; 
and, with a sort of squatter’s claim on his geog- 
raphy, each stockman would take his herd, 
great and small, in the spring, and let them get 
their habits to certain waters and certain salting 
places, and their disposition was then to keep in 
the same bounds the whole summer. The stock 
did better in this way, and were much easier to 
find in the fall. There was one dreaded thing 
that would break the value of this nature’s law. 
The scent of fresh blood of their kind would 
mix all the herds, and throw everything into 
confusion. It would produce great restless- 
ness for days, and it brought on mortal com- 
bats among the bulls. A stray heifer directly 
came grazing up from the water’s edge, and pres- 


176 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

ently she scented this blood. She began bellow- 
ing in a fearful way. In five minutes there were 
a dozen animals on the spot; in ten minutes 
there were a hundred — all bellowing and sniffing 
the air and horning the ground. The noise now 
went out over the prairie, and the herds began to 
rush in from all directions. In a half hour there 
were a thousand head of cattle there. 

What awful language of sorrow this scented 
knowledge of the death of one of their kind will 
bring from a drove of cattle.! What lonesome 
and unpleasant feelings it produces ! To those 
who never heard this sound, it can not be de- 
scribed. Distant thunder is sublime, but it is 
never so awful as this. Thunder is the expres- 
sion of inanimate power — this is the voice of life 
in its own death-wail. When a large number of 
cattle get under the spell of the blood-bellow, 
they are for the time simply unmanageable ; and 
the oldest herdsmen will mount their horses and 
ride out of hearing till it assuages itself. This 
day I could no longer endure the sound ; so I tied 
my sack, and threw it over the saddle, to ride 
away. As I mounted I saw old Emperor, the 
leader of our own herds, coming across the prairie, 
with large numbers of our own brand following 
him. He was a great red-roan giant, near two 
thousand pounds in weight ; and his strides 


Animal Characteristics. 177 

shook the ground about him as he came. I tried 
to head him off. He paid no attention to me, 
and I had to get out of his way. He horned his 
way through the packed mass three hundred feet 
deejp, throwing them to each side as if they 
were so many small fry, till he stood with his 
nose at the spot — and such a defiant and awful 
roar ! It rose above the bellow of the cows and 
younger cattle as the hollow echo of a storm in 
the mountain gorges rises above the shrill whistle 
that only brings the snow and sleet. The cattle 
kept coming. The canal, two hundred paces to 
the north, was here a boundary for the prairies 
above us, but the cattle from them were, by the 
score, now swimming the water and mounting 
the tow-path, only to plunge their dripping sides 
into the long grass and make for the scene. To 
my consternation, I saw the great bull of the 
north herds, King Tear, push his head up over 
the bank, then come into full view, and leading 
a hundred others, rush pellmell for the place. 
The thing sent a chill through me. King Tear 
belonged to a herdsman in the Birch Valley, who 
was careful not to let him cross the water ; but 
this bellowing for the first time brought him 
over. He was fully as large as Emperor — a 
dark brindle, with stripes around the sides like a 
tiger, and with long, shaggy hair over his eyes, 


178 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

and half hiding thick, stocky horns that had 
stood the test of a hundred battles. I knew 
what w^as coming. These strange bulls, meeting 
here, would fight to the death. I threw my nut- 
sack into the top of a bush and urged the horse 
through the crowded mass, if possible, to keep 
them from meeting. King Lear had the start 
of me, and in no time the two animals were 
sniffing the air opposite each other over the spot 
wheie the beef had been killed. No sign of 
grass was now to be seen. The prairie-sod had 
already been pawed and horned away, tind the 
earth had been thrown out more than a foot deep. 
The two bulls caught sight of each other. From 
each there was a roar of defiance, a lashing of 
tails, and a straight charge. The clash shook 
the ground ; and each animal recoiled from it 
with a snort of blinding pain. Emperor threw 
his head into the air, and the blood shot from his 
nose. It looked as if he had met defeat at the 
first onset. I remember I cried. I could not 
stand and see him killed ; and with the fool- 
hardiness of a boy I rushed in to separate them. 
I might as well have been in Guinea for all the 
good I did. I rode between them. They were 
about to charge under the horse, and I had to 
get out of the way. The battle stopped the bel- 
lowing, and the mass moved backward, and I 















































































































































































EMPEROR AND KING LEAR. 


Animal Characteristics. 179 

rode round and round the maddened bulls, trying 
to get Emperor’s attention and drive him away. 
The truce from the first charge lasted but a few 
seconds. They moved sideways, came together, 
and locked horns for a trial of strength. What 
fearful, wild animalism ! Nothing more terrific 
in Spanish delights or Roman amphitheater was 
ever seen. Emperor’s sharp horn went into the 
temple of the brindle bull, and with the faintest 
flinch he rushed upon him and rolled him on the 
ground ; and, missing his second stroke, he threw 
himself to his knees. Both bulls came to their 
feet with horns locked ; and both were furi- 
ously maddened by their roll in the sod. In the 
clash, now, Emperor’s left horn was suddenly 
snapped short off. This broke the lock, and both 
went to their knees. I cried again. Must I see 
the king of our herds killed before my eyes? 
But Emperor’s courage was not gone, nor his 
strength. He was first to his feet, and he dashed 
into his foe before he could straighten himself 
for the charge, and rolled him clear over in the 
sod, and, with a ferocious plunge, he sent his 
sound horn full into King Lear’s side. With 
that I shouted in savage triumph. Since the 
world was, it has made a difference whose ox is 
gored. King Lear did not get up. He bawled. 
Emperor shook his bloody head as if disdaining 


i8o 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


to strike again a fallen foe, and slowly walked 
away. King Lear bled to death in half an hour. 
I made haste for home, and before night we had 
Emperor’s broken horn tarred and bandaged. 
This battle became the news of the country. 

I have in mind, also, a case of conscience and 
character. A part of my work for a few years 
was to drive and manage a four -horse team. The 
two leaders were match-horses. They were fine 
and likely and spirited. They made a better 
show than anything on the farm — so we drove 
them on Sunday. They were fine steppers with 
red tassels in their brow-bands. They would 
dance in the harness, and pull, if everything was 
all right with the driver and the harness, and 
the grade was moderate, and the load reasonable ; 
but they were easily rattled, and when rattled 
they would not pull a pound. 

On the near side at the wheel was a great 
black horse of fine proportion, and generally 
true; but there was a limit to his reliability. 
On the off side at the wheel was an old bald- 
faced sorrel horse we called Tom. Tom was not 
a beauty. He would not go on the market at 
all. Tom had a swayed back, an ungainly jaw, 
and a Roman nose. He had a large -jointed, flat 
leg, and the ugliest kind of feet, that looked as 


Animal Characteristics. 181 

if they had just melted and run out over the 
ground. He was pathetically ugly. But the 
stay-chain was always on old Tom’s side. 
There was no need of any stay-chain on the 
other side, for his end of the double-tree never 
went back. Tom was an honest horse. He 
was always ready, always willing, always even- 
tempered, and would pull at a heavy load up- 
hill whether the other horses pulled or not. If 
old Tom ever had a wicked delight, it was to 
pull a balky horse down under the wheel. 
Father used to say to me: “Now, Rodney, if 
you get in the mud, and you are about to stick, 
keep the leaders out of the way, and put the 
bud to old Tom.” Time and again, when the 
leaders would flinch, I have mounted Tom’s back 
to give him a little more weight ; and I have put 
my boot-heels into his sides, and felt the stay- 
chain tighten as he would catch a long breath for 
a pull ; then the traces would twang, Tom’s 
muscles would turn into iron, and the load would 
move. Because of his sterling worth, Old Tom 
was a family favorite. He was not for sale at 
any price. We kept him till he died, and we all 
went to the funeral, and gave him an honorable 
burial deep under the sod, where the crows could 
not get at him. If ever horses get to heaven, 
old Tom is there ; and he is willing to pull at 


1 82 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

any heavenly load. If holiness there be on the 
bells of the horses, old Tom will be girded with 
bells from fetlock to mane. 

There are people like my leaders. They are 
more showy than trusty. They are beautiful, 
but not reliable. They are good for a parade 
and to cut a dash. They are coach-and-four 
people. For a steady pull and a heavy load 
they are not worth anything. Usually about the 
time old Tom got the load out of the tug of it, 
the leaders in my team would link in, and, for a 
rod or two, nearly pull the tongue out of the 
wagon. Old Tom would take a long breath or 
so, and go quietly along about his business, as if 
nothing unusual had happened. The leaders, 
after taking hold at the wrong time, would quiver, 
and snort, and pant, and dance for an hour. A 
stranger coming along the road would give 
credit to the wrong horses for pulling the load 
out of the mud. 

The bulk of the work of this world is done by 
solid pulling. And for this sort of work there 
is not much credit given at any time. In the 
steady going necessary to achieve it, there is not 
much chance for show. And the people who do 
this kind of work are seldom recognized as lead- 
ers in society. A few fine-conditioned people are 
always belaboring these slow pullers for their 


Animal Characteristics. 183 

slowness. The fine folks are more generally 
reformers and philanthropic in spirit. They 
have fallen in love with humanity (in the ab- 
stract), and they take an advanced stand. So 
did the leaders in my team ; but they did not do 
much pulling. Do you know it is one of the 
easiest matters to take an advanced stand on great 
questions affecting a community ? There is more 
reputation and glory to the square inch of merit 
iu it than in any other position one can occupy. 
So there are people who make a dash in the 
closing hours of a great and patient work, and 
carry the laurels from the steady toilers, with 
those who do not know them. Usefulness and 
honesty are the broadest terms expressive of 
character. They are the sum of the most ad- 
mirable qualities. When an honest man speaks, 
God listens. When an honest man comes to 
die, God says: “Get ye ready, my ministers; an 
honest man is dying. Gather the hosts, and go 
down to the gate. Open wide the portals, and 
when he comes, shout ye, shout ye, and bring 
him to this coronal of universal praise!” 


CHAPTER XIII. 


FISHING SCRAPES. 


“Just in the dubious point where with the pool 
Is mixed the trembling stream, or where it boils 
Around the stone, or from the hollowed bank, 
Reverted, plays in undulating flow, 

There throw, nice judging, the delusive fly; 

And, as as you lead it round in artful curve, 
With eye attentive mark the springing game.” 


— Thomson. 


ITH a friend, last spring, I went fishing. I 



V V had a twenty-five-dollar fishing-rod. I 
had the finest and most tempting bait. It was 
the right month in the year, and the right time 
in the month. It was the right sort of a day — 
a fresh, balmy atmosphere, and with the air so 
still that there was not a ripple on the surface 
of the waters. I also looked at the emboweled 
man in the almanac, and saw that the signs 
were right. 1 fished all day, and never got a 
nibble. I doubt if there was a fish in a mile of 


184 


Fishing Scrapks. 


185 


the bait. Seines, and traps, and dynamite — these 
have played havoc with the fish. If Isaac Wal- 
ton were living now, he would die of a broken 
heart. 

Some visitor at Niagara wrote that yon could 
get the use of a pole and a line there an hour 
for a dollar. You could get some bait for a dol- 
lar. You could also get a man to show you the 
best place to fish for a dollar. But there was no 
use, he said, in paying that last dollar ; one place 
was as good as another — they did not bite any- 
where. It makes no difference now where you 
fish. These are degenerate days. 

The things that I tell you here are rather 
fishy; but I am to record the facts. Our house 
was a half mile from the Wabash and Erie 
Canal, the great enterprise before mentioned, 
extending from Evansville, northward and east- 
ward, three hundred and seventy-four miles to the 
Ohio line. It was begun in 1832, and completed 
in 1853, a t a cos t °f construction of over six mill- 
ions. It never paid the hundreth part of one per 
cent on the investment. It went to decay, and to 
the fishes, soon after it was first put into running 
order. Its waters were alive with every variety of 
fish known to the rivers and lakes of the region. 
And in turn it became a great hatching-pool to 
stock the creeks, and more especially the reser- 


1 86 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

voir, which was its feeder at this point. Water- 
moss grew along the edges of the bed three or 
four feet out, and there was an equal space of 
clear water in the center. I have seen this open 
space black with fish for hundreds of yards in 
length. 

One afternoon, when I had finished the first 
plowing of the corn in the bottom field, about 
three o’clock, I took an old rusty hook, and tied 
to it a string four feet long, pinched a bullet 
over it above the hook, tied the string to an un- 
gainly pole, and, with angle-worms for bait, I 
caught in two hours a string of fish greater than 
I could lift into the wagon. The beauty of this 
fishing was in the fact that I could see the fish, 
and I disdained to put down the bait, except as 
the larger ones would be near to take it. I 
caught more than ten pounds of fish with one 
worm. 

My first fishing alone, however, was for cat- 
fish. These are not a game fish, and you can 
put on your muscle and throw them into the 
trees behind you, if the size of the fish befits the 
feat. A catfish can make the greatest resistance 
to being pulled out of the water of any known. 
It is better to fish for him with a cork. He takes 
hold of the bait in such a bull-dog and definite 


Fishing Scrapes. 


187 


sort of way, that you can take your time to sur- 
prise him with the fact that he is snared. You 
can fish for catfish, and if they do not bite freely, 
you can take a nap between bites. 

My place this afternoon, I tell you about, was 
at the first fork of a great tree that had been 
chopped into the lake, and whose top reached 
out into the deep water of the slough. It was a 
day for yellow-cat. I had taken quite a number 
of small ones and had re-baited, and had lain 
down on the log for a nap, really wishing to be 
let alone, and purposing to let the next meddler 
take the bait or snare himself. I had just gotten 
myself into position, when there was a great 
surge at the pole under me, and with my effort 
to get hold of it, before I could gain my pur- 
chase, another surge pulled me into the water. 
I lost my hold ; but as soon as I found I could 
touch bottom, I made for the pole again. The 
strength of that fish, making for the channel, 
brought consternation to me. Time and again 
in my efforts to pull him ashore, I nearly lost 
my wits in the immensity of his plunges. In 
spite of myself, before he became worn out, he 
had taken me fifty feet out into the lake, where 
the depth of the water gave me little or no pur- 
chase. For a long time that day it was a ques- 
tion whether a boy would get a fish, or a fish 


i88 


Lifk on a Backwoods Farm. 


would get a boy. I got the fish after more 
floundering in the water than I had bargained 
for. He was a twelve-pounder. 

One of the favorite methods of fishing in these 
days was with a spear or trident. The three 
barbed prongs had a handle ten feet long, and to 
this a cord was attached to return the instru- 
ment after striking the fish, or in case of a miss. 
The largest fish in these waters was the pond- 
fish. He could only be taken with the spear. He 
would sink himself in the mud and let a seine go 
over him, or he would break through the meshes 
like a dart. This fish is fond of playing and feed- 
ing in the shallow, muddy water, flushed by the 
spring rains. He could only be found in the 
flooded grass, or in the elbow-brush, where a 
freshet had thrown the lake beyond its bound- 
aries. Your stroke with the trident must be di- 
rected by the waves he produces on the surface 
as he moves, and he must be held firmly to the 
ground till he is over the struggle. I have taken 
out these fish nearly equal in weight to my own 
body. 

The buffalo was altogether the finest gen- 
eral purpose fish of these waters. He is a good 
feeder, a good fighter, and a good grower. In 


Fishing Scrapes. 


189 


May and June great schools of these fish came 
up out of the deep water to have a romp in the 
shallows. Frequently, from these herds, hun- 
dreds of pounds can be taken before they take 
fright. When they become aware of the presence 
of an enemy, the fun is over in a minute. Find- 
ing himself pursued, the buffalo makes a sound 
of fright that can be plainly heard, but can not 
be expressed in letters. It is more nearly like 
the muffled working to and fro of the bottom of a 
tin pan than anything else. Make as great an 
effort as possible to sound the letter B with your 
mouth shut, and you approach it. The leaders 
first sound this alarm. Then hundreds take it 
up with an answer somewhat different. The 
noise must be the sudden explosion of the air- 
sack into the water. With your head under the 
water, this noise is like distant thunder. When 
you are fishing for buffalo and hear this sound, 
put up your tackle and go home. 

The black bass was our game fish. For 
the true fisherman they gave the finest sport. 
They were too quick for the spear. To take 
them with a hook was a fine art, which but 
few possessed. They were a prey to the nets 
and seines; but this is business. There was 
neither sport nor skill about it. You bait your 


190 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

hook for a black bass ; but you catch him, not 
with that, but with “guile.” You must know 
him and his haunts. You must know what 
sort of a fish he is, and when he gets hungry, or 
you may fish in the waters full of him, and never 
tempt him to your snare. In all our country 
there were only two skillful fishermen for black 
bass. There was a tradition that they did not 
bite for boys at all. In this particular, I know, 
my blood was up. I quit fishing for all other 
kinds. The two men who knew best how to 
take them never took company. But, after much 
persuasion, I was one day permitted to become a 
silent partner with the crack fisherman of the 
region. Of course there was much of his work 
that could not be imparted by words, or even by 
seeing him do it. Experience is the only school- 
master. Two things I did learn : one was, 
do not try to land your game straightway ; the 
other was, keep still. Successful fishermen go 
alone. A noisy crowd never caught game 
fish ; they catch minnows and turtles. Absolute 
silence is an essential with the black bass. The 
knock of the oar on the boat, the jar of your heel 
on the bottom, a cough or a sneeze, will send 
them out of reach in two seconds, no more to 
return for that day. They go at the least noise, 
and they go to stay. 


Fishing Scrapes. 19 i 

The third day from my solemn day’s watch- 
ing the crack fisherman, I took my outfit and 
little boat at the first sign of morning, and 
rowed down the arm of the lake, and then a 
mile west to the mouth of Splunge Creek. 
The orb of the sun was half way up over the 
tops of the bottom trees on the other side of 
the lake, and was beginning to build a bridge 
of orange and gold across the stretch of water 
to the western shore, and the ducks and geese 
which had taken to the center of the lake for 
the night were beginning to move towards the 
shore for feeding, when I tied my boat to an old 
snag about fifty yards from the edge. The 
water here was in a slight current, and about 
three feet deep. I had taken every precaution. 
I had crept to that place, using one oar, and with 
all the stealth of an Indian. I had on three 
articles of apparel — a hat, a shirt, and a pair of 
pants. I had a long, slender willowy pole, and 
a line of tested strength. It was made of home- 
spun flax-thread. I had forty-three splendid 
silver-sides in the minnow-bucket. The silence 
was oppressive. I could hear my heart beat, 
and it came near jumping out of my throat, as I 
was holding my breath baiting the hook with 
the first minnow, when a mallard-duck, with 
a great clatter and quack-quack, flew out of the 


192 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

covert of grass near by, and went scudding away 
across the smooth water. The thing so startled 
me that, with a nervous twitch, I dropped the 
minnow overboard. A great whirl in the water 
a moment after showed the game present. I 
baited again, quicker than I can write it, and threw 
the hook out. It had not gone two feet under 
the water until it was taken. Swish — sciz-z-z! 
went the line, out to full tension, then back, and 
around the boat ; and five minutes were gone 
before that monstrous bass was taken in. There 
was no waiting for the game that morning. The 
water was alive with it. The fish in the water 
seemed to regard the snared ones as making 
sport for them. They would play about the 
victims till they were taken into the boat. A 
thirteen-year-old boy at one end of the pole and 
a six-pound bass at the other — what majestic 
sport ! Did your nerves ever feel the thrill of 
this sort of excitement? There is no human 
sensation like it. There is more nervous exhil- 
aration in it than in a shock of electricity. A 
fine fish, worth the taking, is able to send up 
the line and over the pole into your arms and 
nerves a dance of indescribable delight. This 
morning the fish quit biting at nine o’clock. I 
was weary with my splendid catch ; but I had a 
hundred pounds of as fine fish as were ever taken 



A HUNDRED POUNDS OF BLACK BASS 





























Fishing Scrapes. 


193 


from any place. This exploit made me king fish- 
erman that summer. I had suddenly become fa- 
mous. I enjoyed the notoriety, because my boyish 
mind was filled then with that sort of thing. Of 
ambition, I had never thought. Of philanthropy, 
I had never learned that there was such a thing. 
Whether I was a sinner or not, I did not know, 
and did not care. I had never yet thought of 
giving a moral account of myself. No human 
demand of that kind had ever been made on me. 
I do not believe the good God had made any, for 
his reckoning with me came later on. I only 
knew that I loved fishing better than bread. 
The sport was a delight to me for its own sake. 
Call it what you will. Name it the remains of 
savagery, to which heredity clings — no difference. 
It is fun to fish when they bite. 

The lake containing these fish was artificial. 
The embankment that held it was a mile and a 
quarter in length, and of immense proportions. 
Five hundred Irishmen worked at it for more 
than a year. One contractor had the north end, 
and another the south end. During the time of 
the building of this dam, a strife arose between 
the contractors. The man on the south was pay- 
ing seventy-five cents a day for able-bodied men. 
The man on the north was short of hands, and 


194 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

offered eighty cents, and soon got nearly all the 
men. The man on the south nursed his wrath 
two weeks, and offered eighty cents and a jigger 
of whisky. The north works were vacated. As 
a standing offer it took from him his imported 
help as fast as it would arrive. Whisky was the 
drawing card ; but it cost the south contractor his 
life. In a drunken mel&e he was killed by one of 
his men. Then the northern man secured the 
whole job, and finished the dike without whisky. 

During the time of this whisky contract the 
Irish camp at night was an awful pandemonium. 
The one dram each day was a whet to the Irish 
appetite that afterwards knew no bounds. The 
night-camp was an inferno. Many a poor man 
lost his life in its drunken brawls. There being 
no burial-grounds near, it was their custom to 
take their dead comrades with them to the works 
each morning, and lay the body in the embank- 
ment, and before night it would be buried thirty 
feet deep in the earth of the great construction, 
there to await the resurrection morn. During 
the day these plodding builders would not for- 
get to mention the virtues of the deceased. In 
place of a priest, their fulsome praises of the dead 
were made to answer for a funeral service. 
About the same things were said of each man ; 
but they were put in terms strong enough to 


Fishing Scrapes. 


i95 


satisfy the living that splendid things would be 
said of them, if any one of them should be 
killed, and as like as any by the very man who 
might swing the club to crack his brain. 

Next day after Jimmy was killed in the “ Irish 
dance,” the men would put his wheelbarrow 
where they could all pass by it, and each man 
paid his respects to the memory of the dead. 

“ Poor Jimmy!” 

“ Jimmy was a good boy, Jimmy was.” 

“Jimmy was a game man, but he had bad 
luck last night.” 

“Jimmy was a foine man with a shovel, Jimmy 
was. No man on the works could hold a candle 
to Jimmy. The works will suffer, the works 
will suffer.” 

“Jimmy was as plucky a man as ever yese 
see. He would pick his man at the drop of a 
hat.” 

“ Yes, poor Jimmy was too free that way. So 
he is dead to-day.” 

“But Jimmy was a good Catholic. He had 
no priest to shrive his soul ; but the Holy Mary 
will be merciful to Jimmy when she knows the 
grit in the man.” 

In the course of a few years this lake filled 
with the myriad life of the finny tribe, and at- 
tracted idlers to its banks for an easy living. 


196 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

The land immediately about was largely owned 
by the Canal Company,, and these idlers took a 
squatter’s claim, built cabins, and were spending 
a free and easy life. They were pre-empting 
the best fishing-grounds, and making a monopoly 
of the business. They were turning the Sab- 
bath into a day of hunting and sport. They 
were gambling and running houses of infamy to 
the ruin of scores of young men. They were 
killing the cattle of herdsmen for meat, and 
were becoming insolent of what they called their 
rights. 

It came to pass that the land-owners of the 
region, to get rid of this bad citizenship, decided 
to cut the embankment, and let the lake into the 
river. The law formally protected the company; 
but the whole canal scheme having failed of its 
purpose, there was no utility in the lake, and if 
cut, in case of resuscitation of the canal project, 
the lake could be restored at an expense of a few 
hundred dollars. There was a plot to cut it out, 
but it was a plot in the interests of decency and 
good morals. The time set to cut the embank- 
ment was on a certain November night. A par- 
ticular wild Irishman — a land-owner, professing 
friendship — gave the plot to the fishers; and, 
unexpectedly, these forty or more men, when 
they had reached the place for the cutting, 


Fishing Scrapks. 


197 


found as many or more fishermen, armed to the 
teeth, and in possession of the embankment. 
Shovels and pickaxes were of no service against 
pistols and shotguns; so there was nothing to 
do but to retreat in good order, if possible. The 
hot-headed among the fishermen were urging 
war on the spot. They proposed to make use 
of the advantage. The land-owners scattered 
and dismounted, and stood behind their horses. 
The cool-headed among the fishermen were dis- 
posed to be peaceable. In one sense they had 
the advantage ; but to make use of it would avail 
little. In an attack in the dark they could not 
hope to kill many of these law-breakers, and 
there would be a hereafter. The fishermen were 
disposed to parley. Under the shadow and 
covert of a thick grove of walnut-trees, the land- 
owners had quietly gathered for council, and had 
decided to ride off, leaving the men in posses- 
sion, when the leader of the other party called 
out in the dark : 

“I will meet your spokesman, and he shall 
not be harmed.” 

The leader of the citizens thereupon walked 
out with four others, and held a consultation with 
them. The fishermen said they were there to 
protect their property interests. They admitted 
the count of bad morals and thieving, and prom- 


198 IyiFEj on a Backwoods Farm. 

ised to lead in a reform. The parley closed with 
an agreement that the lake should stand two 
years, to give the fishermen time to wear out 
their nets, and then the dike should be cut. But 
at the end of the two years the fishers were better 
equipped than ever. 

On another blessed November night, at the 
late hour of eleven, the old clan met at the place 
of its former defeat, armed to the teeth, and with 
trusty pickets and scouts to guard the workmen 
while the embankment was being cut through. 
Before daylight there was a stream running 
through, two feet wide and eighteen inches deep. 
Before night next day, the crevasse was fifty 
feet wide and ten feet deep. What a fearful 
torrent and flood of water rushed out to flood the 
low-lands beyond ! What multitudes of damage- 
suits followed! Several arrests were made for 
the destruction of public property ; but nothing 
came of them, except a number of fat attor- 
ney’s fees. 

All this is incidentally preliminary to a great 
fishing time. After the water had run about 
half down in the lake, some parties staked the 
crevasse, and kept the bulk of the fish from en- 
tering the river. They had finally to resort to 
the bed of the creek, which was three miles or 
more in length, and to an occasional bayou, and 


Fishing Scrapes. 


199 


to an original shallow pond covering about forty 
acres. With the approach of winter the water 
froze over, and on the ice fell an eighteen-inch 
snow. The fish were so packed in this confine- 
ment, and so shut off from the air by this cover- 
ing, that when a hole was cut in the ice, they 
rushed up to it like pigs to a trough. They 
could be taken out with any sort of snare or 
sharp instrument. The common tool used was a 
pitchfork. The news of this sort of fishing soon 
spread over the country, and the creek and pond 
were lined with men with teams, and hundreds 
of tons were taken within a fortnight. I cut a 
small hole in the ice near an old log, and in two 
hours and a half took from it fifteen hundred 
pounds of fish. Alas! there was no skill in this, 
and there was no luxury in it. The whole com- 
munity was surfeited with fish. Besides, the 
goose that laid the golden egg was slain. I have 
had a thousand regrets about the destruction of 
this beautiful lake of water. With that, my fish- 
ing days were ended. 



CHAPTER XIY. 

“WILD OATS ’’-TWO CROPS. 

“Stinkingest of the stinking kind, 

Filth of the mouth, and fog of the mind, 

Africa that brags her foyson, 

Breeds no such prodigious poison.” 

— Lamb. 

“ Take the open air, 

The more you take the better; 

Follow Nature’s laws 
To the very letter ; 

Let the doctors go 
To the Bay of Biscay ; 

Let alone the gin, 

The brandy, and the whisky.” 

— Anon. 

O NE afternoon, I was sent out over the neigh- 
borhood to invite hands in to help raise the 
new barn-timbers next day. I had made my 
way partly around, and passing through a wood- 
lot, I fell in with a boy who had been to Hazel- 
green in the forenoon, and had purchased a new 

style of Star-plug tobacco. He was chopping 

200 


WiiyD Oats” — Two Crops. 


201 


wood and chewing tobacco, especially the latter. 
He was very much in love with the quality of 
his plug. He could take that thing from his 
pocket, and put it to his lips with more than or- 
dinary gusto and manly dignity. I thought I 
never met a boy with as fine manners. He 
showed me how to swing an ax, and to strike 
the timber at just the right angle to throw the 
chips. He gave me quite a number of samples 
of how a boy did who was able to put on airs. 
I borrowed a chew of tobacco. This fellow was 
a liberal soul, and offered it freely. He urged it 
on me. Tobacco-users, they say, are all free- 
hearted. They will divide the last chew with a 
fellow-mortal, though he be a stranger. And 
they take to themselves great credit for this 
trait, as if they were some sort of superior beings, 
made so by the possession of the bent of this 
appetite. The whole guild is more or less self- 
deceived by that thing. That is not free-heart- 
edness, or liberality, or a desire to benefit others, 
but a desire to divide a certain amount of filthi- 
ness and sin with others. Mortals are given to 
deceiving themselves with the notion that, if 
others are involved in similar weaknesses and 
sins with their own, there is a divided responsi- 
bility. This high spitter of a boy, with all his 
airs, was not exactly easy with his fresh plug, 


202 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


and he sought to involve another boy for com- 
panionship. He succeeded. He made me feel 
like a child in his presence, and then made a 
fool of me. I took a chew, and went on. There 
was a pretty girl at the next house. I had my 
pockets full of sweet notes from her, and another 
was due me. I intended to go in there and 
make myself agreeable ; but before I reached 
the gate, I was having some very disagreeable 
feelings. I halted at the gate, made my errand 
known, and, with very little courteous ceremony, 
I turned down the path that led out into the 
woods toward home. I walked in the path alone 
for a while, and then, using the path for direction, 
I made it from tree to tree. I saw things green, 
and I saw things black. Then I turned com- 
pletely blind. The world would whirl half way 
round with me, and then whirl back. The path 
before me would wriggle like a struck serpent, 
then come up before my eyes and scatter itself, 
till I could not find it. Several times the path 
scattered itself among the tree-tops, and I could 
not go on without it. While holding to the trees, 
I had the sensation of slipping up to the tops, of 
turning to a turkey-buzzard, and of soaring into 
the sky, and vomiting filth and carrion over the 
fields. I would get about a mile high, then I 
would turn to a jackass, and go thundering to 


Wild Oats” — Two Crops. 


203 


the ground ; and with an awful thrash I would 
bring up at the roots of the tree where I started. 
I remember at the time wondering at that. 
After one of these flights, I could see the path 
again for a few yards ahead; then the green and 
the black would return, and the path would sift 
itself out through the tree-tops, and I would 
take a greater buzzard-flight than ever, turn 
to a jackass, lose my powers of flight, and come 
to the ground with an awful thud. Alighting 
seemed to knock me into my senses for a few 
minutes. I made this trip three separate times. 
You say I was sick? Yes, I was really sick ; but 
it was doubtless good for me that I got such 
first-class entertainment out of my first chew. 
It induced me to go out of the business, then 
and there. If the nausea of the poisonous nar- 
cotic had come into my system by tidbits, I 
might have been a tobacco-user. But, soberly, 
will a weed that throws the body and brain into 
that sort of furor be of any value to either? 
Some one has defined a cigar as “a little roll of 
tobacco, with fire at one end, and a fool at the 
other.” 

I do not fully understand how I came through 
my boyhood days sober and respectable. Since 
I am not a drunkard, I am certainly not a 
creature of circumstances. Environment some- 


204 


Tifb on a Backwoods Farm. 


times works its opposite. It produces disgust, 
and throws one the other way. The laziest 
man in all our country raised a remarkably in- 
dustrious boy. The healthful influence of oppo- 
sites, however, is only exceptional. The law of 
an evil life is in the direction of the sway of 
temptation. The old Tanning grocery in Hazel- 
green was a standing woe. It was a miserable 
shanty, with a rude counter along one side and 
across one end, and on this counter was the 
great whisky-barrel, with a faucet and a tin-cup. 
The drinking of rum, the debauchery, and blood- 
shed of this hole, no pen will ever describe. In 
the name of the wreck of all the playmates of 
my childhood, except two; in the name of every 
broken-hearted woman in that community; in 
the name of every child born with the alcoholic 
life in its veins; in the name of a community 
overcrowded with weaklings because of rum, I 
put down an indictment against that Tanning 
grocery. I put down the work of one little 
doggery. I put it down because my soul 
loathes it. 

1. Under one proprietor it has made a thou- 
sand drunkards. 

2. More than twenty of these have died with 
delirium tremens. 

3. A thousand women, and as many more 


Wild Oats” — Two Crops. 


205 


children, have been brought into wrongful and 
cruel suffering. 

4. Manning’s children, five in number, all 
gone to the bad. 

5. The business of the community robbed of 
its strength, and the enterprise of it driven out. 

6. For Fanning himself, an old age of de- 
spair and abject poverty. 

I was under the influence of liquor once. 
Three of us, one Christmas eve — Dan Banner, 
Lewis Hardy, and myself — went to Hazelgreen, 
and made the following investment. We had 
no thought of doing such a thing, until we were 
in the atmosphere of the place. We had gone 
to make our usual Christmas purchase of can- 
dies and toys: 

Three glasses of beer, 15 cents. 

Three “ “ 15 “ 



Three 


Three glasses of wine, 


One glass of whisky for Dan, . . 10 “ 

We bought some matches and nails. We 
had no purpose in this, other than to give an air 
of business to the transaction. We went out of 
town noisy. We threw the nails against a barn, 
and made a fearful racket. On the road home, 
Dan took offense at some small matter, and 


206 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


wanted to fight. Rather than not get a fight 
he would try both of us at once. We were not 
in a fighting humor, and were surely not in fight- 
ing condition, and we persuaded Dan to put that 
thing off a day or two. We stopped by the road- 
side, and wasted our matches trying to start a 
fire with green-oak branches. Lewis tumbled 
into the leaves, and was soon in a maudlin and 
insensible state. I took in the situation, and, 
with Dan’s help, we loaded him up, and started 
down the road to Lewis’s house. We had gone 
about twenty feet when we had a head-end col- 
lision. The ground was frozen and rough, and 
we both stumbled and fell. Lewis gave a piti- 
ful, quivering whine, as his head went into a 
deep rut, and as we could get nothing further 
from him, we thought we had killed him. We 
felt for his pulse, and did not find any. We 
carried him down to his mother’s house, and laid 
him on the top plank of the steps, made for cross- 
ing the rail-fence in front of the cabin. His 
mother was a widow. We could not bear the 
thought of taking in to her the dead boy. We 
straightened out his legs along the plank, and 
tied them together with Dan’s big bandana. 
With my handkerchief we tied his wrists to- 
gether across his breast. We put a chip on 
each eye, to keep them from the hideous open 



■ ■ ■ r 




mm 


u WE PUT CHIPS ON HIS EYES.” 



















































































































- 4 % 






























































































































¥ 





“Wild Oats” — Two Crops. 207 

death-gaze when his mother should find him next 
morning; and we left him there in the cold 
silence of that wintry night. We left him, some- 
what consoling ourselves with the idea that his 
body, fixed in that way, would be in shape for 
the coffin. This was long after midnight. I 
went home with Dan for the two or three hours 
till daylight. In a silly, whimpering way, we 
talked of going to the funeral next day, and tried 
to think of the future of a boy who died drunk. 
I was first to come from under the influence of 
the intoxicants. What fearful physical depres- 
sion and headache ! What awful moral humili- 
ation ! What smitings and agony of remorse ! 
There was a slight mental relief in the knowl- 
edge, without going to make inquiry, that Lewis 
w^as not dead. But physical death to myself, or 
to the other boys, under natural circumstances, 
would not have been so awful as this occurrence. 
I had been so familiar with drunkenness in 
others, and had so loathed it, and now it had 
touched my own life with its damning disgrace! 
Without feeling that the other boys were greater 
sinners than myself, I resolved to break their 
companionship. I resolved never again to en- 
ter Tanning’s grocery. I started home, and the 
thought of meeting my parents, filled me with 
horror. What account could I give of myself? 


208 IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 

We had not thought of drinking until we en- 
tered the grocery. But why did we do such a 
thing? I searched for mitigation and excuse, 
and found none. I seriously, for the first time 
in my life, contemplated not returning home. 
The thing was not done in a corner, and the 
news broken to my mother would put despair 
into her life about me, and break her heart. I 
saw, through the dark contrasts of that morning, 
how my mother’s pride had been centered in 
me. Every stitch in my clothing had been 
taken by her diligent fingers. The blue-and- 
scarlet wool-muffler around my neck had been 
finished by her needle the day before, and tied 
about me with a kiss. I could stand my fath- 
er’s chastisement, if it came ; but I could not 
meet my mother’s sorrow. The news reached 
them before I did ; for it was high-noon before I 
had made the journey of half a mile. When I 
entered the house, there was silence, and there 
was silence in that home for days. I could see 
that they were wondering if this was the begin- 
ning; if all their hopes and plans were to be 
blasted. They showed me the greatest solici- 
tude. Mother especially was more than usually 
attentive to my wants. I never saw the glory 
of this home-love till then, and it seemed to be 
burning me up. Instead of wrath, I had kindled 


“Wild Oats” — Two Crops. 


209 


love, and it was about to consume me. No word 
of rebuke ever came from either of them. After 
some days of this chastening silence, father said 
to me: 

“Rodney, I had rather bury my boy, than to 
know that he would live to become a drunkard.” 

Mother said : 

“If you want to kill your mother, take an- 
other drink in Tanning’s grocery.” 

I told them that if they could trust me at 
all, they should never have another hour’s anx- 
iety about that. Then the shadows fled from 
that home, and the coming days brought a bloom- 
ing paradise. 

The man who sells liquor is a scamp. The 
man who buys and drinks it is a scamp. That 
drinkers are simply unfortunate people, with 
good, clever hearts, is sickly sentimentalism. 
Drinking, when its consequences are known, is 
always the product of a bad principle. 

Not long ago I was in conversation with a 
famous physician, who had come from the sick- 
room, and he said : 

“I have just been trying to patch up the 
body of an old toper.” 

I said : 

“ Do you prescribe alcohol?” 

“I seldom use it in my practice.” 

14 


210 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


“Why?” 

“Well, there is no plaee for it as a necessity 
of life. It supplies no force to matter. It has 
no new matter for organized tissue. The ani- 
mal tissues can not assimilate alcohol. It is a 
product of death, not of life. It is one of the 
ghosts of putrefaction and decay.” 

“ What is the first effect of alcohol on the 
system?” 

“It quickens the action of the heart. This it 
does by weakening the contractile force of the 
arteries and minute blood-vessels ; but languor 
always follows this increased and unnatural work. 
Chloroform will do the same thing. Alcohol is 
only slower.” 

“What is the next effect of alcohol on the 
system?” 

“Functional muscular change. The lower lip 
usually gives the first sign. Then there is loss 
of use of the limbs. The most effective way to 
ruin the muscular power is to introduce alcohol 
into the system.” 

“What do you regard as the next stage?” 

“The mind is in chaos. Reason is off duty. 
The stomach also revolts, and there is vomiting. 
The animal instincts are supreme, and there is 
finally insensibility.” 

“What gives the toper his red nose?” 


Wild Oats” — Two Crops. 


2 1 1 


“That is a delicate question; some people 
have red noses who are not addicted to alcohol.” 

“I am aware of that, doctor; I am after a 
diagnosis of the toper’s nose. The other folks 
never neglect an opportunity for explanation. 
Each one of them tells you how his proboscis 
came to be in that condition ; and he tells it 
glibly, as if he had familiarized himself with it.” 

“Then I will tell you. It is the effect of 
alcohol on the blood corpuscles. The frequent 
weakening of the contractile force of the small 
blood-vessels affects them so that they do not 
return to their normal condition after the imme- 
diate effect of the alcohol is gone. The blood- 
vessels become irregular and congested. Cutane- 
ous excitation passes away at first ; but finally 
the vascular supply remains to tell the tale of a 
constant debauch. The abiding effects of in- 
toxicants shows on the nose first because the 
circulation in the nose is feebler than in most 
other parts of the body. Alcohol has done its 
damage elsewhere. 

“The reduction of arterial tension by alcohol 
is also the cause of roaring in the head, often ex- 
perienced by drinkers. Indeed, the permanent 
effects of the alcoholic life are the most serious. 
It were serious, but not so greatly so, if surface 
excitement, and uncertain muscular action, and 


212 


Fife on a Backwoods Farm. 


the maudlin foolishness of a crazed brain, were 
the only results. Alcohol produces an excess of 
fatty globules, causing fatty degeneration of the 
heart. It also produces an excess of the connect- 
ing tissues — affects the liver, and brings on ab- 
dominal dropsy. It is also the fruitful cause of 
Bright’s disease ; and of course delirium tremens 
and death.” 



CHAPTER XV. 

AN INDIAN LEGEND. 

Over wide and rushing rivers 
In his arms he bore the maiden ; 

Light he thought her as a feather, 

As the plume upon his headgear ; 

Cleared the tangled pathway for her, 

Bent aside the swaying branches, 

Made at night a lodge of branches, 

And a bed with boughs of hemlock, 

And a fire before the doorway 
With the dry cones of the pine-tree. 

All the traveling winds went with them, 

O’er the meadows, through. the forest; 

All the stars of night looked at them, 

Watched with sleepless eyes their slumber.” 

— Longfexeow. 

O NE bright, brisk morning in June we turned 
the cattle out of the pound in the edge of 
the timber, and drove them westward more than 
a mile to the sweet grass on the high ground of 
Fort Harrison Prairie. We started them north- 


213 


214 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

ward as we had done many a day before, and 
they went lazily feeding over the short grass 
toward the marshes of Lost River, two miles or 
more away. The cattle knew as well as we did 
how long it would take them to fill their 
paunches, and about when they would get thirsty, 
and where they would get water. By ten o’clock 
they would reach the lowlands, and go tramping 
knee-deep in mud through the sage and elbow- 
brush to the edge of the sluggish stream that 
had hardly channel and current enough to know 
where it was going. They would fill themselves 
with water, and stand in the stream midsides 
deep, without moving for half an hour. An ox 
full of grass and water is the laziest thing on 
earth. These cattle, after cooling themselves, 
unless they got a scare, would hide in the 
deepest shades along the water-course till the 
middle of the afternoon, and would then come 
browsing over the prairie again. Our work for 
the day, therefore, was not finished till near sun- 
set. Herding cattle is a lonesome, lazy business, 
if it is skillfully done. There is no profit in it 
unless skillfully done. The cattle, while feed- 
ing, must be let alone. To be forever bunching 
them is to fail utterly. 

We knew our business, and the next thing to 
do was to get ourselves out of sight somewhere 


An Indian Lkgknd. 


215 


in the shade, and take things easy for at least 
twelve mortal hours. 

Our horses were sniffing the fresh air of this 
June morning in a restless way, wanting to be 
turned loose to their own feeding. Father was 
mounted on a dark, dapple-bay printer horse, 
which was seven years old that day. The 
morning sun shining on his glossy coat showed 
him as spotted as a leopard. He was a nervous, 
fretful creature. He was not vicious or tricky, 
but so high-tempered and full of life that only 
a splendid horseman and rider was safe in 
handling him. Whoever mounted him found 
both his forefeet in the air to be off like a flash. 
No slow-poke was ever on Jerry’s back. When 
your foot first touched the stirrup, you had to 
mount or quit trying. Jerry was not averse to 
being ridden — he only meant to say by this wild 
impetuosity of spirit: “I will carry you like a 
cradle, and as fast as the wind, if you can get 
into the saddle.” To be carried by this great 
horse was worth an effort. The fine nervous 
spirit of the animal under you was like a tonic 
to the system. I had been on this horse, and 
had held my breath, and let him fly over 
the prairie. He was not my horse, and I was a 
little jealous of him. 

I was riding a powerfully built sorrel mare, 


2 16 IviFK on a Backwoods Farm. 

five years old, who answered to the name of 
Croppie. She had known nothing but the sad- 
dle from a colt. She had been trained specially 
for cattle-driving, and was finely adapted for its 
quick spurts and short turns. She was high- 
spirited, but in a different way. She had never 
known defeat. She was ill-natured almost be- 
yond endurance — certain she was to nip me, 
when I mounted, unless I held her head the 
other way with the rein. She believed in her 
own rights and powers. Among fifty horses she 
would master the whole of them. She scorned 
a fence, and during a night she would lead 
everything in her field into mischief. Over the 
prairies and along the roads I had tried the 
crack animals of all the boys of the country, and 
she easily led them. But she was always mad 
about it. She ran with her ears back. She 
seemedJ:o enjoy being mad at everything about 
her. I often wondered if she knew her beauty 
was marred by the tip of one ear being frozen 
off when she was a foal, and if that had not 
made her ill-natured.. This mare was my prop- 
erty. I was afraid of the speed of Jerry, and 
jealous. * The two had never been tried together 
in a test of speed ; but I had sent them both 
separately over the smooth sod, and had tried 


An Indian Eegend. 


21 7 


to gauge the speed of each by the swish of the 
air, and by the way the tufts of grass flew by 
me. Jerry looked as if he could outrun Croppie. 
For a mile heat, I was sure he could; and if 
ever the test came I intended to stipulate the 
distance. 

Father says : 

“Well, my son, the cattle will now take care 
of themselves till we need to put them in the 
hurtle at night, so we might as well hunt a 
shade and hobble the horses on the grass.” 

“Where shall we go?” 

I was looking wistfully down a stretch of 
prairie with as smooth a surface as ever nature 
makes in the wilds, towards a cottonwood-tree 
standing alone in the open space not more than 
a long quarter away. I was on the point of 
saying to father, “Watch Croppie run!” when 
he startled me by saying: 

“I can beat you to that cottonwood.” 

“Come along then,” I said; but before the 
words I had lashed the mare in the flank, and 
the third jump I was leading the horse a length. 
My mare did not need the whip to do her best 
that morning, but I gave her the lash each jump 
on general principles. I came out three lengths 
ahead. Each turned outward in a short curve 


2 1 8 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

and brought up under the cottonwood. The 
two racers put their noses together, and father 
said : 

“Hi, ho! your little sorrel boss can run like 
a jack-rabbit.” 

I paid no attention to the slightly disrespect- 
ful banter. I knew I was riding the queen of 
the turf. Nothing more was said about the 
race. We turned the heads of the horses west- 
ward, and went at a slow pace down a narrow 
dip in the ground, and up on the high bank 
which overlooked the Wabash more than a mile 
each way. The tulip-trees were in full bloom, 
and their branches were hanging over the banks 
till the tips kissed the water. There were 
shrubs of every kind, and such wild profusion of 
flowers that the air was redolent with their per- 
fume. Across the stream in the low ground, 
where the river had thrown its alluvial for gen- 
erations, great sycamores and walnut-trees 
towered till the tops were level with the eye as 
we stood on the summit of the prairie. The 
sun was throwing a monstrous silver sheen on 
the water. The finny tribe were snapping up 
every beetle that was so unfortunate as to strike 
the current. Spirits of Beethoven and Handel 
and Mendelssohn, keep silence here! The 
birds in these branches are bringing from their 


An Indian Legend. 


219 


throats a chorus of songs greater than all your 
oratorios of art. O, the ravishing beauty of 
that place ! The greatest dullard would have 
been hushed into silence by the scene. This 
aroma of leaf and bud and exuding trees is an 
enchantment, but it is real. If this does not 
enter into your life, what does? To walk over 
a carpet of cowslips and blooming buttercups 
is to have the sweetest thoughts, and to have 
new messages of beauty enswathe the spirit. 

There may be things in these visions of the 
beautiful in nature that the morbid soul never 
sees; but to the soul able to read nature, it is all 
very real. There is not the first glint of hallu- 
cination about it. Invisible currents of mag- 
netic charm come from the trees and the flow- 
ers. To resist such a charm is to be a great 
sinner. What free course the spirit has! 
What broad fellowship the heart feels! What 
catholic sympathies the soul breathes! Nature 
is a mesmerist in her quieter moods, and she is 
wholesome in her violences. Her lessons are 
all spontaneous. There is no plan or premedi- 
tation, no getting ready for an onslaught of 
pedagogy. There is a simple, clear voicing of 
the truth in monosylables. Nature is the great- 
est teacher of childhood. Purity, sincerity, 
brotherhood are poured into a child’s soul 


220 


Fife on a Backwoods Farm. 


through its avenues of beauty. Nature is never 
weary, she is never impatient; she never scolds, 
so that you are afraid to go again. Nature is 
willing to wait till the fullness of her beauty is 
able to show itself in the developed forces of 
your own character. She does not expect to 
change the spirit radically or momentarily. 
Her hand is most delicately plastic. Nature is 
not a hard teacher; she wooes and wooes until 
the heart’s strife is calmed in her presence. The 
things done for the soul by the trees and brooks 
and sky are not formally recorded. They 
simply do their work and want no credit. To 
teach useful things, and reveal herself by de- 
grees — this is nature’s business. Nature is coy 
of a thousand things. This wrought universe 
is largely a mystery yet. The human mind has 
only come into the edges of the great unex- 
plored. But nature says, If you will come into 
responsive association with my moods, I will 
not hide my heart’s love from you. Follow the 
bees, and be taught industry, wisdom, govern- 
ment. Go into your garden and tend it ; but 
listen to what the flowers say to you, and the 
voices that speak to you out of the shimmer of 
the morning and evening light streams, and 
then go up to gleam at you from the stars. Go 
out under the covering of the night when the 


An Indian IvKgknd. 


221 


dew is falling, uncover your head, and let God 
bathe your brow with nectar, and claim you for 
his child. We have no use for any theology 
which denies nature’s teaching. We have never 
felt free to deny it a spiritual existence. Nearly 
all that is real about it must be spiritual. These 
evanescent and changing forms of matter do not 
constitute its reality. When the soul of a child 
responds to the opening of a flower, it is drawn 
by something more than the organic chemistries. 
There are real spiritual forces at play on the 
spirit there. So it is that the things most com- 
pletely natural are the greatest character-build- 
ers. A biologist is not so deductively. He has 
deciphered great laws from a multitude of small 
things; and the least sinful of all the idolatries 
is to become a worshiper at shrines built in the 
woods, or on the prairie, or on the ocean, or in 
the angry bosom of the storm-cloud. A boy in 
the country lives close up to a lot of facts, and 
the real substance of all his experience comes to 
be a part of him in manhood. Their intent, 
greater than we usually give credit for, is to in- 
fluence his nature. The things a boy gets from 
nature are not spread out before him all at once. 
They are not ostensibly spread before him at all. 
He opens his eyes and sees; he hears, he touches, 
he tastes, he smells; and all these sensuous 


222 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


awakenings abide liis own time for subsidizing 
and reflection. What he needs is given him in 
fragments, without his being able at the time 
to see how they go together. From the many 
pictured pages he may not see the profound har- 
mony and unity until he is able to correct all 
spiritual aberrations in the sober, settled experi- 
ences of mature manhood. Man matured is the 
best known illustration of the correlation of 
forces. All nature is conserved in the country- 
man come to town. The trees and brooks and # 
landscapes have an immortality in him. 

So the wild life of my childhood had this 
deep philosophy to me. The same conditions 
to-day would afford me a great and instructive 
companionship. I am yet frequently driven to 
go out into the thickest woods, and stand under 
the overarching trees, and feel their sympathy 
and stillness and seclusion, and let them take all 
the bitterness and soreness out of my heart, so 
that I can feel at peace with the world again. I 
can not get so near God in this great crowd. 
My heart aches for the woods. O the woods, 
the woods ! 

Father had removed his hat, and was looking 
out over the water in reverent silence.. There he 
stood, six feet two inches — his black hair, now at 


An Indian Legend. 


223 


forty, turned to an iron gray — smooth-shaven 
face, thin lips, decided Roman nose, reddish blue 
eye, and as keen as a hawk’s. He had in him all 
the marks of a fine Scotch ancestry. He was 
not a philanthropist with broad views, but a typ- 
ical American. He was a money-maker and a 
lover of his family. He gave the energy of his 
business life to my mother and myself. He was 
a proud man that day. I believe he was proud 
of me; not because I beat him in the race, but 
because of the awful purpose I showed to come 
out ahead. It would have been the same if he 
had beaten me; and he really intended to do 
that, but he did not have the horse-flesh under 
him. He saw, I think, that there was some of 
his own spirit in me, and he was proud of it. 
Nothing of this did he say; he simply looked 
out over the water. 

The horses reaching for the prairie-grass, re- 
minded us that we must unsaddle and let them 
graze. He took two hobbles from the loops be- 
hind his saddle, fastened them around the fet- 
locks of the horses, then slipped the bridles and 
let them go. We turned into the shade of some 
apple-trees, which were now laden with the set- 
tings of fruit. 

“ This is the famous Indian orchard,” said 
father. 


224 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

There were five large, thrifty trees set in a 
semicircle, opening to the south. The elevation 
of the ground in the center was artificial, and 
there were plain traces of the wigwams of the 
savages. I soon found some arrow-heads, and 
the upper and nether stones of an Indian meal- 
mill, about worn out, and for that reason, doubt- 
less, cast away there. 

“Did the Indians plant this orchard?” I 
asked. 

“Yes; they brought the seeds from Pennsyl- 
vania. Here the tribes were permanent enough 
for this sort of business. There is a beautiful 
legend about this orchard, and this piece of 
ground in the center.” 

“ What was the legend?” 

“I do not know that I can tell it as it was.” 

“Try it, father; try it.” 

“I will tell it as I heard it, and if it is not all 
true to fact, it is true to nature. 

“This, you see, is a surpassingly beautiful 
spot. So will you find that the camp-grounds of 
these ‘ children of the forest ’ are usually famous 
for beauty of situation. We are charmed with 
this beauty, and the Indians were attracted by 
the same things. An Indian encampment is an 
infallible index to the finest point in the country. 

“ This orchard gets its name from the legend. 



WIGWAM OF LENA AND NEMO 
































































. 

l'* 








































An Indian Ekgknd. 


225 


These trees were planted and cared for by the 
heroine of the story. Eighty years ago there 
was here an Indian village. You see that this 
is the only place within miles where such a view 
of the river can be had. Here the tawny sav- 
ages fished and hunted. Here, on the clear 
ground, the squaws raised Indian-corn. On these 
stones they ground it into meal. On other flat 
stones they baked it for their lords, and took a 
little for themselves, if there was any left. Here 
Indian boys were tanned by the sun darker than 
nature in birth had made them. Here they be- 
came skillful with the bow and the sling. Here 
the young warriors would come from the hunt, 
throw their game at the wigwam door, and go 
down to the river there and bathe their weary 
limbs, return to the camps, and recount deeds 
of valor for the hundredth time. 

“Among the women of this village was one 
unlike the rest. She was a young, fair-haired, 
blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon. She was prized for her 
superior knowledge in tent-making, for her skill 
in tilling the soil, and for the fact that she had 
added refinement to every rude Indian art. The 
Indians of this country, as you have already 
learned in your school-books, contested every 
inch of ground against the approach of the white 
man. From the Eastern Coast to the Mississippi 
*5 


226 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

might be called conquered territory. But the In- 
dian left a bloody and blackened road behind him. 
He has faded before the white man, because the 
white man is a man of destiny. As the Indian 
retreated, he burned and pillaged white settle- 
ments, and carried off with him women and 
children. This beautiful, blue-eyed girl in the 
camp of the Delawares was taken when a child 
from a burning cabin, after its father and 
mother had been massacred. The girl had 
never known any other than this sort of life. 

“When it became apparent to the Common- 
wealth of Pennsylvania that she must, in self- 
protection, guard the far West from the en- 
croachments of a foreign power, it became 
necessary to make peace with the Indian tribes 
of the region. To do this, there must be shown 
a vigorous policy toward them. Pennsylvania 
furnished a thousand troops, to which was 
added a company from Virginia, who marched 
into this Western country to treat with the 
strong tribes up and down the Ohio. Finding 
an army coming west, many of the people of 
the States, and from the settlements, who had 
relations or friends who had been captured by 
the Indians, came west to search for them. 

“The campaign was under the command of 
General Boquet, who succeeded finally in hold- 


An Indian Legend. 


227 


ing a peace-council with the representatives 
from the Delawares and the Senecas and the 
Shawnees. After the pipe of peace had been 
smoked, and after much parley, they pledged 
themselves to bury the hatchet, and to bring in 
all the white captives as far west as the Wa- 
bash. The Shawnees were sullen and morose 
in this council, and they were the strongest 
and most warlike tribe; but they finally con- 
sented to bring in all the white captives. Red 
Hawk was their chief representative and orator, 
and his voice was law among them. 

“By the stipulation of the peace treaty, all 
the white captives were to be brought in by the 
next spring. Runners were sent to all the vil- 
lages to carry the news of the treaty, and with 
them went an order to bring in the captives. 
A fearless and swift Shawnee brave was dis- 
patched to the villages along the Wabash. His 
course was a direct one. By the rising and the 
setting sun, by the moss on the trees, and, when 
neither of these were available, by an unerring 
Indian instinct, this young warrior, just now ap- 
proaching manhood, made his way across path- 
less woods and broad rivers, and through dark 
forests, where even the Red Man had seldom 
been. He would take his food with the arrow 
and bow from game so unused to being hunted 


228 L,ife on *a Backwoods Farm. 

that nothing tried to escape him. He plucked 
wild grapes from the burdened trees, and drank 
water from sources that none but the wild ani- 
mals had ever known. At night he slept on 
the ground, with his two arms for a pillow, and 
with nothing for his covering but the emerald 
mantle of an American sky. Day after day he 
traveled through wood and over prairie, till, at 
last, in the afternoon of an autumn day, he 
stood yonder across the valley on the knoll by 
that cottonwood, and he saw the smoke curling 
from the wigwams of this Delaware village. 
Through the glint of orange and crimson leaves 
he saw the waters of the Wabash for the first 
time. The day before, a mountain-eagle had 
swept in front of him, and he had put an arrow 
through it, and had plucked its finest feathers 
for his hair. A broad belt, richly wrought with 
beads, encircled his waist. In this belt was a 
scalping-knife and a tomahawk. A tanned deer- 
skin was thrown over his shoulder in old Roman 
fashion. His ankles were wrapped half-way to 
his knees with the strings that fastened his 
moccasins. In the rich gloaming of that autumn 
evening, clad in the finest Indian costume, stood 
Nemo, the hero of this legend, before the wig- 
wam of old Wakarusa. This aged chieftain 
(after a vesper-song from the blue-eyed Saxon 


An Indian Legend. 


229 


girl) had been rehearsing for more than the 
hundredth time stories of his own bravery; and, 
flushed with the excitement of his own tales, he 
saw a shadow fall into the door of the wigwam. 
He looked up, and there stood, not three paces 
away, a hated Shawnee. Old Wakarusa raised 
the war-whoop and grasped his weapons. The 
young Shawnee stepped back a few paces, drew 
an arrow from his quiver, fixed it in his bow, and 
stood waiting. The Delaware chief advanced 
with tomahawk till Nemo had drawn his bow to 
transfix him, when the blue-eyed Lena rushed 
between them, and shouted to Wakarusa: 

“‘O, my father, slay not the stranger. He 
only asks for food and shelter, and he comes 
on a peaceful mission.’ 

“‘ Does a Delaware parley with a Shawnee?’ 
said the old man. 

“‘He is an enemy,’ said Lena ‘but he is tired 
and hungry, and asks for repose. Did a Dela- 
ware ever refuse these even to an enemy?’ 

“The old chief threw down his tomahawk, 
and welcomed the young brave. Lena placed 
food before the new-comer, and then gave the 
old chief his venison. After the silent meal, 
Nemo took from his neck a string of shells, on 
one of which was engraved the Great Chief ; 
and on another a pipe of peace ; and on another 


230 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

was engraved Nemo himself, leading a white 
captive to the home of the Great Chieftain. 
These symbolics were plain to Wakarusa. He 
knew that the Shawnee had authority from the 
whites to take Lena to the settlements. Lena 
listened attentively, but she could not under- 
stand it all. She knew she was a pale-face but 
she had never seen another than her own. She 
had an indistinct and filmy memory of her 
childhood. Her mother’s face would come be- 
fore her now and then, like a passing shadow. 
She had a confused impression that she had 
been in war and had fled from fire. She was 
looking in the face of the old chief, and she saw 
consternation there, and she said: 

“‘What is it my father? Has the Shawnee 
brought you bad news? Have the Delawares been 
defeated? Has the Great Spirit forsaken us?’ 

“‘My child,’ said Wakarusa; ‘you are the 
fair one among a thousand. You are as pure as 
the snow, and dear to me as my life. I took you 
from a burning building after your father and 
mother had both been killed ; and O, how many 
moons I have been a father to you! And now 
the pale faces have sent for you. I know the 
consequence of keeping you here. You are not 
a Delaware. The wigwams of your people are 
far toward the sunrising.’ 


An Indian Legknd. 231 

‘“Why should I leave you?’ said Lena; ‘I 
know no other father. If there are people of 
my blood, I do not know them and will not be 
like them. This wigwam is the only home I 
know. Must I leave it?’ 

“‘My child,’ said Wakarusa, ‘waste no words. 
You know not what you say. By the time of 
the morning light be ready to go with this young 
Shawnee. He will not harm you. He must 
give an account to the white man for your keep- 
ing. Wakarusa’s heart is broken. The prairie- 
grass will grow over his grave in a few days. 
My eyes are now dim, and I shall never see you 
again, my beauty.’ 

“In the gray dawn of next morning Nemo led 
Lena through the dew of the grass over the 
prairie sward where we left the cattle an hour 
ago. He led her toward the sunrising along the 
way of the pathless forest. Other captives were 
brought to Nemo, and he became their guide in 
the long journey eastward. 

“ Nemo gave his finest care to Lena. He 
wrapped her in his own deerskin in the chill of 
the night. He fed her with the best parts of the 
venison. The Shawnee moved and won the 
heart of Lena. They were betrothed ; but the 
white captives were delivered, and Lena with 
them. Nemo returned to his people, but there 


232 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


was a great purpose in his heart not to lose his 
fair-haired Saxon. The flesh of his own dark 
cheek was not a curse, and he claimed her with 
a silent oath before the Great .Spirit, and with 
his approval. Lena's childhood had fixed her 
character . She knew nothing of her father and 
mother, and her brothers were as strangers. She 
had no taste for the delicate living and rich lux- 
uries of the civilized. Her heart was never 
drawn from her Indian lover, and she wept for 
the glorious beauty of her home on the Wa- 
bash. 

“The written statutes have but little control 
over the affections. The laws of Pennsylvania 
forbid this admixture of blood in marriage; but 
it did not prevent the mutual love of these two 
children of the woods. Under cover of the 
night Nemo escaped with his betrothed into the 
forest, and they undertook their long journey to 
their home on the Wabash. After the two were 
far beyond the bounds of civilization, with the 
primeval forest two hundred miles deep all about 
them, these plighted ones were married by all 
the forms that nature knows anything about. 
There, in an open space in the woods, they 
swore to each other a lifelong fidelity. The 
wild fawn came to the edge of the thicket to at- 
tend the wedding. The bear growled consent. 


An Indian Legend. 


233 


An eagle flew above them, and screamed a wel- 
come. This was to them mostly a silent, glori- 
ous journey of joy. They had to go cautiously, 
sometimes traveling only by moon and stars 
through the hunting-grounds of the Miamis, 
who were the mortal enemies of the Shawnees. 
One evening before sunset, as they were passing 
by stealth through a dense growth of oaks, sud- 
denly three Miamis were upon them. Nemo 
leaped behind a tree, and the Miamis began tying 
Irena’s hands. Nemo put an arrow through the 
foremost. The next Miami thought to keep Lena 
between himself and her lover, but Nemo clipped 
a ringlet from Lena’s hair and sent an arrow 
into his brain, and he dropped dead at her feet. 
Nemo sprang from behind the tree, and the two 
warriors stood for mortal combat. Nemo’s 
arrow missed its goal, and two tomahawks 
whistled in the air. One now fought for love, 
the other for hate. Nemo received the Miami’s 
blow on his left forearm, dropped his tomahawk, 
caught the knife in his belt, and put it into the 
heart of the Miami. Three scalps were taken, 
and the two traveled by night till they were out 
of the Miami country. When Nemo and Lena 
reached this spot the summer was gone. The 
snow covered the earth, and the bleak north-wind 
whistled about them. The wild-geese and the 


234 


Lifk on a Backwoods Farm. 


waterfowl of every species had gone south, and 
the river was frozen from bank to bank. 

“The Delaware camp had been broken up, 
and old Wakarusa had been buried yonder in 
the prairie-grass, but the mound above it had 
not yet sodded over. Neither asked the other 
what to do. Nemo with his tomahawk cut ten 
smooth poles and stood them together with an 
opening at the top ; then placed them around 
with others; then covered this frame-work over 
with bark, and outside of this they thatched it 
with the tall spears of prairie-grass that stood 
above the snow. They built a fire in the center. 
Nemo rubbed together two pieces of basswood 
punk till they took fire by friction, then he blew 
them into flame with his breath. Nemo’s trusty 
bow supplied meat of turkey and deer, and here 
they lived and loved till spring broke upon 
them as we see it to-day. 

“Lena had brought apple-seeds in her wallet 
from the orchards of her people. She planted 
them here around her wigwam. This rude hut 
was her home, and she garlanded it with flowers, 
not neglecting the grave of her foster-father. 
Her garden here was just such as this soil will 
give to diligent hands. It was to her the gift of 
God. Nemo was a warrior, but from his wife 


An Indian Fegknd. 


235 


he had learned to know God also. Rare com- 
bination, he was a worshiper and a brave. 

“For the length of many moons, here Nemo 
and Fena lived with the wolf and the panther 
and the bear for their companions — with the 
birds for their friends. This paradise of nature 
was their home. Their canoe was like a thing 
of life on these waters, and the sweetest fish 
to be caught from any stream Fena roasted 
over the coals in her tent. They were a law 
unto themselves. They saw the truth, and fol- 
lowed it. They answered the voices of nature ; 
so they paid no penalty, and were happy. 

“A child was born unto them — a beautiful, 
bright-eyed boy. This child was brave and ten- 
der-hearted. Fena clothed him in the finest 
buckskin, and wrapped him in furs on wintry 
nights. She would weave his hair with the 
feathers of the red-bird, and in the beauty of 
spring she would deck his brow each day with 
a coronal of flowers. Fena was a happy woman. 

“One autumn day, as the sun was beginning 
to touch the tops of the trees in the lowlands 
here, Nemo was sitting in the door of his tent, 
while Fena was preparing the evening meal, 
when his eye caught a moving object making 
its way around that drift yonder, just this side 


236 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

of the bend in the river. Nemo’s eye kept 
trace of the moving thing as it came around 
the drift, and crept close to the bank, and came 
up the stream, until he could see that it was a 
canoe containing five painted warriors. The 
canoe stopped in the eddy at the bank yonder, 
and five braves crouched into the willows, and 
began single file to ascend the bluff. Nemo 
sprang for his weapons and shouted through his 
teeth, “Miamis!” This was answered with 
a war-whoop, and the Miamis came rushing 
toward the wigwam. In their rush their arrows 
were missing their mark. An arrow from 
Nemo’s bow killed the leader, and another the 
next, then the three were upon him. In the 
desperate encounter he took the life of another 
Miami, and an arrow pierced his own breast, and 
he fell dead at the door of his tent. Lena in 
consternation took the child from its couch, 
threw it into the arms of her enemies; then 
caught the scalping-knife from the belt of her 
dead husband, and took her own life before they 
could reach her, — thus preferring death to dis- 
honor. 

“It is said the surviving Miamis buried Nemo 
and Lena both in one grave out there beside old 
Wakarusa. The legend goes on to say this 
child was taken down the river to the Miami 


An Indian Lkgend. 


237 


tribe, grew up among them, and escaped to the 
Shawnees and was the companion of Tecumseh 
at the time of the treaty with General Harrison; 
that he fought in the battle of Tippecanoe, and 
finally died by the side of the great chief in 
the battle of the Thames. Thus endeth the 
legend. It is known to all the tribes. It is a 
standard in Indian folk-lore. The Shawnees 
believed there was an enchantment about this 
place, and their maidens thought it a priceless 
privilege to make a pilgrimage to the grave of 
the virtuous and heroic Lena. 

“It is past noon and we have not eaten,” 
said father. 

The place seemed to me too sacred for hun- 
ger, and I went out to the summit to see if the 
horses were in sight, and when I returned he 
had unrolled the delicate lunch mother had pre- 
pared for us. We minced at it. Father had 
been so wrought upon by his own story that he 
had no desire for food, and he then laughed at 
it. We talked another hour of the Indians. I 
dug into the tent-inound — found other trinkets 
of beads and carved shells and arrow-heads — 
placed the find in the packsaddle — then we 
caught the horses and rode back over the prairie, 
where we found the cattle ready filled for the 
kraal. We reached home an hour after night- 


238 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

fall, and a queenly woman gave her husband 
and son a royal welcome. 

My thoughts and feelings about the Indians 
were largely shaped by this legend and the Life 
of Daniel Boone. Neither of them is quite true 
to life. One overdraws the picture, and the 
other does not do the Indian justice. 





CHAPTER XY1. 

SUNSHINE. 

“A worm! A god! — I tremble at myself, 

And in myself am lost. At home, a stranger, 

Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast, 

And wondering at her own. How reason ‘reels ! 

O, what a miracle to man is man ! 

Triumphantly distressed ! What joy! What dread! 
Alternately transported and alarmed! 

What can preserve my life? or what destroy? 

An angel’s arm can’t snatch me from the grave; 

Legions of angels can’t confine me there.” 

— Young. 

U P to this time, along these pages, I have been 
trying to present dispassionately some of 
the very common yet very natural forces that 
influence child-life. I have not been in search 
of the vicious and the good ; but of the good, 
bad, and indifferent. I have purposed to make 
record of some things which have never yet 
given any moral account of themselves, and 

239 


240 


Life on a Backwoods Farm. 


with the feeling, all along, that just such things 
as these will appear finally to have great sig- 
nificance in the character. I do not believe 
that the smallest events in the life of the com- 
monest child are simply facts and nothing 
more ; that they are simply bones without life. 
Whatever touches a child, touches a life ; and to 
touch a life without influence, is an impossibil- 
ity. It were an interesting study at least to in- 
quire into the action and reaction of the non- 
ethical forces. In the scale of all the influences 
it is not utterly futile to ask where these little 
things belong. There may be a large philos- 
ophy in a lot of small things. 

To trace the laws of the moral nature and 
the hand of Providence through one’s own 
dawning intelligence, is a difficult introspective 
work ; but it is not egotism. I have spoken in 
my own name and authority. I have used the 
first person, singular number, the more freely be- 
cause I knew that I was not to record remarkable, 
but natural things. If anything profitable or 
edifying shall come out of my childhood annals, 
the world need never lack for literary material. 
We know only the surface lives of one another. 
The real history of the commonest human life 
would be a remarkable thing. Mortals are not 
possessed of the data for such a work. An auto- 


Sunshine. 


241 


biography, even, could not be a work of that 
nature, because the human spirit has not suffi- 
cient knowledge of the springs of its own activ- 
ities. Others do not know us as we know our- 
selves ; and we do not know ourselves as we are, 
or as God knows us. It has not been my pur- 
pose thus far to designate a product, but to 
point out streams of influence ; and to do this 
without the least intimation that I believe my- 
self now only the composite shape into which I 
have been squeezed by these streams of influ- 
ence. An event may have influence without 
having the mastery. The first condition might 
be healthful, and the last destructive. The sov- 
ereignty is within. The human spirit must be 
distinguished forevermore from all purely natural 
things, for at bottom it is a great solitary. To 
be a man is to be distinguished from nature ; to 
be an individual is to be distinguished from 
one’s fellows. The man who has been built into 
the mass, like bricks into the building, stands 
or falls with the mass. The man who has been 
built alone can stand alone. These are the 
Daniels and Nehemiahs. They are like Moses 
and John the Baptist. They are the Alexanders 
and the Caesars and the Hannibals. They are 
the incarnations who have kept themselves from 

absorption. The essential thing in this world is 
16 


242 L,ife on a Backwoods Farm. 

personality. It is this that conquers and uses 
nature, rules kingdoms, re-shapes the world’s 
policies, and drives back the moral death-damps 
from the face of society. The personality rep- 
resents vigor, and vigor means duration — it 
means immortality. 

There may be something in phrenology, but 
the bumps do not make the man — the man 
makes the bumps; though it is confessed he 
must have a sensuous world against which to 
bump himself. The point is in the distinc- 
tion. The potentials are within ; and they are 
creative. The universe without is the exponent 
of the soul’s highest powers. There is nothing 
little or small that can possibly happen a death- 
less spirit. Any force capable of influencing a 
human being is a character-builder; and it does 
not go by without doing its work in one way or 
another. It is not relevant to ask a mortal to 
show that force in its final product. He might 
be able to do so ; but more likely he is not able, 
because he is not God. The soul in eternity 
will be impressed with the fact that it has been 
this way. The world ground will be upon it 
forever. Whether outward and upward, or 
downward, this life will have made its mark. 
So then also with each small event. 


SUNSHINK. 


243 


I rise up to-day to be satisfied with my child- 
hood. I suffered somewhat from ignorance and 
superstition, and from boorishness, and from 
lack of opportunity as it is now understood; but 
I had compensations in country air for my lungs, 
and wholesome food, and I had time in solitude 
to make the acquaintance of nature and life, and 
I had a home. 

It is said that nations have their spontaneous 
age, which is followed by the reflective. The 
same thing is true of the individual. I have 
learned since my boyhood that the most serious 
time in a boy’s life is from the time he begins 
to think that in a few years he will have to 
take responsibility on his own shoulders. The 
certainty that he must get beyond the smoke of 
his father’s chimney, and choose an individual 
struggle with the world, is of more serious con- 
cern with him than the particular work he will 
undertake. 

The world is not very considerate of a young 
mail’s feelings. When he comes to be about 
grown, it begins rudely to put a man’s boots on 
his feet, a man’s coat on his back, and a man’s 
hat on his head. It expects him to stop his 
whimpering and undertake something. So, at 
such a time, he begins to take measurements ox 


244 


Fife on a Backwoods Farm. 


himself and of the world. He becomes a vexed 
questioner of his own duty and aptitudes. He 
is more or less alarmed in the presence of an 
obligation to arrive at a life-long conclusion. 
It will never do to stand still, and let the world 
go by. This intellectual turbulence, however, 
in a young man beginning his career, is rather 
a favorable sign. It signifies a determination 
not to live at random. 

It signifies an intention that the debits and 
credits of life shall balance. It signifies a 
knowledge that to begin life as a shirk is to 
close it despised. 

I am not sure but the reflective age came to 
me sooner than usual with boys. From my 
fifteenth year father hardly exercised paternity 
over me, as I understood it in childhood. It 
was companionship. I had already come to 
better educational qualifications ; and it was a 
part of my work to make all his business calcu- 
lations requiring figures. I became, therefore, 
familiar with his business life and methods, and 
naturally took great interest in them. In the 
intervals of my school-work I was his constant 
companion in the field and among the herds, 
and in his buying and selling. I was the con- 
fidant of all his plans for money-making. In 
our work there were many hardships. We were 


Sunshine. 


245 


out in rain and storm, and we went winter and 
summer. There were weary days and whole 
nights of travel. There was great personal ex- 
posure in much of it, and, to me, these times 
had their discouragements ; but I was held up 
and urged on by his unflagging interest and 
zest in the business ; and in the face of many a 
hard job he would say to me: “This is a hard 
job ; but there is money in it, and the money is 
for you, Rodney.” So I learned that it was, as 
in after years a rich patrimony of money came 
to me. But the richest human thing I ever 
coveted was the mantle of my father’s royal 
spirit. 

What I should undertake as a life-work was 
naturally and wisely, I think, left an open ques- 
tion during the years of these annals. It is 
time enough to climb a mountain after you 
reach its base. I never lacked neighborly ad- 
vice as to what I should make of myself. In 
these gratuitous offerings it was always assumed 
I could make of myself whatever I preferred. 
The thing would come out to order, of course. 
It had not in their cases, but it would in mine. 
The folks who have traveled the journey of life 
part way, have usually made up their minds 
about things as they have passed along. They 
have opinions. They think they have taken in 


246 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

the situation. They pride themselves 011 the 
reliability of their own experiences. Yet these 
my counselors were not all in harmony with 
each other. I saw them along the way before 
me ; some light-hearted, just getting started in 
life; others farther along, and weighted, like a 
ship to its guards, with the load; others had 
gone to the summit, and were trembling down 
the sunset side to the grave. In certain ways I 
saw crowds going; in others so few that the road 
would be lonesome, at least for lack of com- 
pany. I saw people in each other’s way, jost- 
ling and pushing each other out of the road and 
down the precipices. I saw others, who had 
formed partnerships and had difficulties. I 
heard much bewailing over the lot of others, 
who had taken the wrong road. I saw people 
in all stages of prosperity, and in all stages of 
adversity. From the lives ahead of me there 
came a bedlam of sounds. 

And yet they were, as a rule, in the attitude 
of regarding me as in my leading strings, the 
upper end of which they must hold, to keep me 
from bumping my precious nose. It is not 
strange that young people have little relish for 
taking advice. Some of these people who were 
brimming over with advice, were possessed 
with the wretched weakness of never being able 


Sunshine. 


247 


to make up their minds in their own cases. 
They were not lacking in patient and profound 
analysis of their own mental aptitudes. They 
sought the advice of all their uncles and their 
cousins and their aunts, and then they stood 
around in the great open threshold of life, until 
it was too late to take anybody’s advice. They 
recruited the ranks of the great army of the un- 
decided. A few of them are living to this day. 
What their business is I do not know, and I have 
known them from childhood. They have not 
pushed out to sea, neither have they anchored 
to shore. They are idlers, with nothing to do. 
Breathing, with them, is spontaneous. They ex- 
pect somehow to get provender, and they expect 
animal nutrition to take care of itself; but they 
do not expect to take any responsibility or to do 
any work. They appear to be without an idea, 
unless it is that they have come to the wrong 
world, and they are trying to repudiate their 
surroundings. They taught me at least what 
my life ought not to be. 

I do not know a time since I was old enough 
to think about it at all, that I lacked confidence 
in my own future. 

Among the honorable pursuits, one’s life here 
is not taken under the calculation of nice 
chances. There are reliable features and cer- 


248 IyiFK on a Backwoods Farm. 

tain results to any manly life. So surely true 
is this that to fret is to sin. Success or failure 
is not settled by the toss of a copper. Success 
is as natural as can be. This is not a chance 
world. There is no such thing as accident. 
Good luck is an evil angel with despairing 
wings. Success in life is not measured by re- 
sults but by the things that bring about the re- 
sults. You stand on the bank of a great stream 
and you see the foam on its surface, and the 
leaves and driftwood in its eddies. These at- 
tract your eye, and may be the first things to 
rivet your attention, and partly because they 
are surface things ; but they lead you directly to 
see, and, above all, to feel the sublime and resist- 
less volume of the current. Any human life 
may have such volume in it as to be practically 
resistless. The river will sooner lose its chan- 
nel than an honest life its course. The river 
will not lose its channel, because it makes its 
channel. It will reach its destiny. So will the 
soul purposed in high things reach its destiny 
through all the changes of human circumstance. 

My greatest lessons were from life. I saw a 
purpose to win in the wolf-chase; I saw the 
glory of high aims in the eagle’s flight; but the 
greatest inceptive lesson of profit of which I 


Sunshine. 


249 


can make any estimate, was my hunt with the 
two boys in the bottom. The next day I saw 
its spiritual parallels, and I have never been 
able to get away from them. I had no religious 
creed, but I believed in God and in the immor- 
tality of the soul. I could see, therefore, that for 
place or position or wealth, no man could afford 
to be beaten on his spiritual side. For about 
fifteen years, I am sure, I opened my eyes to see, 
and then I began to shut my eyes and think. 
I was an honest, if not an earnest seeker after 
the truth — the real truth, as distinguished from 
phenomena. I was in constant contact with the 
common religious life of the community; but, 
unlike the great majority, I could not accept all 
that I saw and heard. It was a time for the 
reign of the pulpit ignoramus. Now and then 
a Simpson would come in reach, and sway the 
people into charmed and rapt attention to the 
concerns of the eternal world; but the common 
pulpit pabulum was a conglomerate of narrow- 
ness and bigotry. There was so much igno- 
rance in it, not only of the Scriptures, but of 
the commonest facts of history and human 
nature, that a large share of the common sense 
of the community stood out in revolt against it. 
Some of the poorest excuses for manhood were 
the greatest mouthers of piety. There was 


250 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

among us a numerous sect whose preachers 
were great disputants. They were ready for a 
debate day or night. So it was that the key to 
the religious life of the country was the school- 
house debate. Here the religious (giants!) pig- 
mies met and contended over the very shreds of 
doctrine, as if heaven or hell hung on the issue. 
The community would divide itself. Each side 
would take unfair advantage of the other. 

And in the rising religious strife would be 
manifested all the worst passions of bullyism. 
Religion in the community became not a life ; 
not the showing of any likeness to the charac- 
ter of the Nazarene, who went about doing 
good. It was a system of disputations. 

I was not able to draw the line between the 
reality and this, its travesty. So I became a 
scoffer at religion as I saw it. I said, if that is 
religion I do not want religion. 

There was also another side to the religious 
forces about me which did not produce so great 
disgust ; but it brought greater perplexity. My 
mother was a member of the sect called Meth- 
odists. This fact, of course, had its predispos- 
ing effects on me; but it did not explain the 
things I heard and saw. 

Two words will define an early Methodist. 


Sunshine. 


251 

Faith is one, and zeal is the other. The faith 
of these people ended in superstition, and their 
zeal ended in furor. I could see how the inten- 
sity of these two qualities became an explana- 
tion of their swift accomplishments under the 
most adverse circumstances; but I could not see 
their relevance to the Christian life. These 
people had no learning, but they certainly had 
originality. They had a free-hand movement 
and spontaneity of life which gave offense to 
precedent-loving people. Their preachers were 
usually men of energy and self-reliance, and 
they were rich in religious enjoyment. Now 
and then there was a brother more noisy than 
edifying; but these wandering itinerants were, as 
a rule, men who had directness of aim. 

They never shot at game over the hill. They 
preached as if they believed the light was in 
their candlestick, and they never allowed things 
to go by default. But how rude and uncultured ! 
The only compensation I can see in it was, that, 
on that account, they may have had some adap- 
tation to preach the gospel to plain people. 
Certain it was that they were not waterlogged 
with a fastidious taste about, deviations from the 
rules of good grammar or rhetoric. They were 
more intent on the content of the message than 
on language, or manner, or the graces of oratory. 


252 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

These Methodists were a furious set. They 
were swayed by great gusts of revival, that, like 
a cyclone, took up everything in its bosom. It 
did not appear that such mercurial spirits could 
hold together. It looked as if the material they 
worked on would all be used up as soon as the 
world should become civilized. They delighted 
in a species of religious intoxication, many of 
whose manifestations were intense and violent. 
Bad effects, mentally and physically, were com- 
ing from them. In some cases there was loss 
of consciousness — mental blindness — mental 
deafness — lasting for hours. There were not 
only leapings and shoutings which were natural, 
but out of taste as expressions of the joy of in- 
tense natures under the impulse of religious 
fervor, but there were now and then violent 
contortions ending in hysterics. There were 
frequent cases of insensibility. All conscious 
rationality was gone. Naturally, it is expected 
that the human spirit will have some quicken- 
ings of movement in the face of its destiny ; but 
without question, these revivals had damaging 
features about them. Abnormal physical states 
were sometimes produced by them. I saw these 
things, and it put an end to my interest in the 
meetings. They stood between me and the 


Sunshine. 


253 


truth. But the preachers gloried in these phe- 
nomena. They declared they were the power 
of God ; and now and then a man would use all 
his art to bring them about. He would court 
the greatest crudities of worship. What strange 
notions about seeking religion they had! In a 
sweeping revival, there was an overgrown young 
man seeking religion. He was at first at the 
altar on his knees, then down on his face on the 
floor, then on his back. The contortions of his 
arms and legs made it a little unsafe for the 
workers around the altar. They pulled his 
boots off' each night, so that his kicks would not 
injure the shins of the saints. One night he 
was in a fearful way, but was not converted. 
The pastor said to him at the close : 

“John, you must not be discouraged; you 
pray on, and God will bless you.” 

“O! I am not discouraged,” said John; “I 
thought I was about to get through there once 
to-night, but I gave out.” 

Some of the people would meet angels on the 
way home ; some would have special revelations 
from heaven ; others would recite marvelous men- 
tal visions, which they believed to be from God. 

An aged colored woman attended the meet- 
ings in a certain place, and was convicted of 


254 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

sin. She was unlearned, but of strong propen- 
sities both physical and mental. She was 
wrought upon, and became an earnest seeker. 
She conceived the idea that she was to be con- 
verted in a boat on the water. The itinerant, 
in his rounds from house to house, in the inte- 
rim of the public services, called to see her, and 
found her sitting in a wash-tub praying earn- 
estly. The preacher said : 

“Dinah, I do not believe it is necessary for 
you to punish your body that way. That will 
do no good.” 

“O, Brudder, I ’s gwine to be converted in dis 
here way,” said the colored woman. 

The preacher left her mourning. Next 
morning she came to the meeting, and told the 
following experience : 

“My brederin, I tells you how it was. I 
prayed way into de night, most nigh to de 
mo’nin. By an by de water begin to come up 
in dat room ! Dat tub begin to go out at one 
end, and den it begin to go out at tudder ! It 
float roun in dat room! De moon shine down 
in dat water! After a long time mo’, a little 
white dove cum fru de winder, an lit on de bow 
ob dat boat, and sed, Peace to di soul ! An den 
I knowed I was converted.” 


SUNSHINK. 


255 


I stumbled over things like this. That was 
an hallucination, evidently. I could see no 
truth anywhere near such things. My mother 
did not know about these matters, and she 
would only say that was the human side; and 
then she would hold me more than she knew 
by her calm and and holy life. 

This colored woman was a truly religious 
woman ever afterwards. This was the perplex- 
ing thing about it. These phenomena would 
not please me by showing wholly bad results. 
The profane would become reverent ; the licen- 
tious would become pure ; drunkards would be- 
come sober; and many were evidently lifted 
into better lives. 

For four years I stood confused in the face of 
these incongruities. In a morning meeting I 
heard my mother say that she knew that the 
peace of God was possible for the human heart, 
that she had daily communion with the great 
Father, and was a very happy woman. That I 
believed. I was glad I could believe something. 
I had then three articles to my creed. The 
being of God, the immortality of the soul, and 
the reality of my mother’s faith. 

Might it not be that these people were honest 
in that they were ignorant of many of the com- 


256 IyiFE on a Backwoods Farm. 

plex laws influencing tnind and body, and were 
putting a wrong interpretation simply on these 
phenomena, which were natural and psycho- 
logical, and not at all miraculous? I had a little 
experience one morning that gave me a clue to 
the religious trance. It was before breakfast, 
and I was not well ; but, whittling a stick, I cut 
my finger. A slight matter indeed; but as I was 
holding my own hand for the bandage, I sud- 
denly became sick and lost consciousness. I 
had fainted ; after a boast of years that such a 
thing could not come to me. The particular 
thing about the occurrence was the peculiar sen- 
sations and intellectual quickenings I had on 
coming to consciousness. The clearest and 
sweetest and most remarkable intellectual vis- 
ions of a life-time centered in that moment. I 
could wish for their return, did I not know they 
were produced under abnormal physical con- 
ditions. This mental experience was suggestive 
of meaning to me sometime afterwards, when I 
heard an honest but mistaken trance revivalist 
say: “If the Ford ever takes you into a trance 
once, you will pray to be taken again.” 

Some one has defined nightmare to be a state 
in which the nerves of motion are sound asleep, 
and the thought-centers are fully awake. Som- 


Sunshine. 


257 


nambulism is almost the opposite. It is a state 
in which the nerves of motion are awake, and 
the thought-centers are asleep. A trance has 
been defined as a state in which some depart- 
ments of the mental stimuli are dormant and 
asleep, while others are awake and active. 
Those in the trance state are likely to be awake 
along the line of the prevailing disposition. If 
the trend be religious, and the subject be igno- 
rant of the reflx influence of the mental and 
physical powers, it then takes but a small vein 
of the superstitious to lead the subject honestly 
to the conclusion that God has been making a 
special and most favored communication. 

It came to pass that these psychic and mural 
forces which are of such interest and perplexity 
to my religious thinking, began to disassociate 
themselves from the real questions at issue. At 
the last, and truest and best of all, I became 
aware of my personal accountability to God, in 
the sense that I saw and felt my sinfulness; 
and I sought and found the riches of an un- 
measured peace. 

One more thing I will put down here. A'ter 
five years of heraldry and courtship, I won the 
heart of the most brilliant and beautiful country- 


258 Life on a Backwoods Farm. 

girl in four counties. I married her. It was 
the smartest thing I ever did. We have gone 
down the years together, and there has been 
sunshine — sunshine. 





























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